Ginger and Vanilla Pear Tarte Tatin with Chocolate Puff Pastry

Tags

baking, chocolate, fancy, France, ginger, pears, puff pastry, recipes

I ain’t gonna lie.  I lost a little sleep over this thing.

That’s part of the challenge with desserts like cakes, pies, and tarts: you can’t sample them to make sure they taste okay!  Wahhh.  It’s probably a good idea to do a test run on them, but when you don’t have much money to spare, that’s not always an option.

That was definitely the case with this tarte tatin, especially because puff pastry is so expensive!  (I am well aware that it’s definitely worth it, though!)  I noticed a few weeks ago that Dufour now makes chocolate (!!!) puff pastry.  Having only heard rave reviews about their original puff pastry, I was very intrigued.  So intrigued, in fact, that I just skipped over the regular stuff and went straight for the chocolate!

Mini Banana Cream Pies

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baking, bananas, easy, pie crust, pudding, recipes, whipped cream

…or Glorified Banana Pudding Cups.

Oh, hey, neglected blog. HEY. (sorry…!)

We’ve got another family birthday, which means another perfect excuse for me to bake!   (or rather, a reason to bake when I haven’t had much time to do so for fun.)  This time, it’s my mom’s birthday, but I didn’t ask her what she wanted since she’s usually pretty vocal about what she likes.   One of her favorite desserts is key lime pie, so I almost made mini key lime tarts (specifically these…omg). However, it seems like I’ve made a lot of key lime things for her in the past, so I decided that mini banana cream pies would be a good idea since she loves banana desserts, too.

I LOVE BANANA PUDDING, so for me this was a win/win situation.  (Growing up, I would always get either those star pops or banana pudding blizzards whenever we went to Dairy Queen.)  That said, I had never tried making banana pudding from scratch.  When I started searching for recipes, I kept finding some for vanilla pudding layered with bananas and Nilla Wafers.  While I do appreciate vanilla pudding, I wanted banana pudding.  That’s when I thought to check Homesick Texan, and bingo!  With roasting a banana as the first step, I had found my recipe.