The Dessert Crowns X-Mas Dinner: Apple-Chestnut Cheesecake Tart & Pear Crostada & Pumpkin Cheesecake Gingersnap Macadamia Nut Crusted Madness... OH MY!

“The dessert crowns the dinner. To create a fine dessert, one has to combine the skills of a confectioner, a decorator, a painter, an architect, an ice-cream manufacturer, a sculptor, and a florist. The splendour of such creations appeals above all to the eye - the real gourmand admires them without touching them! The magnificence of the dessert should not allow one to forget the cheese. Cheese complements a good dinner and supplements a bad one.”
~Eugene Briffault (1799-1854)

Apple-Chestnut Cheesecake Tart, just prior to being baked. The fragrances wafting out of the oven through the apartment would make even the most ascetic heavenly angel salivate like Pavlov's dogs. 

Some wisenheimer was once said to have sagely advised, "Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first." Well, truth be told, I prefer to drink my dessert. (Not a wise thing to do on an empty stomach, trust me. Sorry, Ernestine Ulmer.) As a rule, I'm not a dessert eater but tis the season to be indulging... it's yet again what those songs, jangling incessantly in malls all across the country since mid-November, remind us is the most wonderful time of the year, and I've got visions of sugarplums dancing in my head. Almost. It's a bit early still for me to be thinking and feeling Christmasy, but I'm trying to put the bloom on my mistletoe and get all my gingerbread men in a row to regale you, dear reader, with the joys of Noel.

Although, honestly, I don't even buy a tree until the 20th of December or so. The frantic search for a perfectly fresh Noble Fir amidst a nearly empty lot containing vagabond trees that even Charlie Brown would look askance at has become an annual tradition for me. Once my young, blonde, bonhomous, well-muscled South African delivery man drives me and my tree home,  and we squeeze it into our apartment's narrow doorway, I  wait until Christmas Eve to decorate it while the esposo and I have Vince Guaraldi, George Winston and Paul Winter playing in the background. Then after the tree lighting ceremony where O Tannenbaum is sung, we cozy up and watch our favorite Christmas videos with champagne, foie gras pate, a cheese plate with olives, honeycomb & spiced nuts, ahi poke, smoked salmon, shrimp cocktail, a wee bit of caviar. Charlie Brown, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Scrooge - the 1950s version with Alastair Sim all keep us company on Christmas Eve. It's intimate, it's quiet, and pine scented... Gosh, I love the scent of pine... Christmas Day dinner these days in Casa Gomez is usually an orange-scented garlicky pork roast, truffly smashed potatoes, choucroute... pretty simple, straightforward stuff. A nod to my husband's Germanic heritage. I will make something sweet for breakfast but that varies year to year. Tradition dictates these matters, and I become its willing slave. There is certain comfort in the rituals of these celebrations of culture whether one is religious or not. Atheist though I may be, I become a devout worshipper of Christ during the winter solstice, my limbic brain is parochial school green plaid skirt clad this time of year as I search for the holy brioche. Me... pounding the pavement, scaling mountains of concrete, descending into the hell of bread lines, but persevering... striving... and surviving the madness and mayhem of holiday grocery shopping with pain de mie and hawkwing mushrooms for all...

Growing up in my little East Harlem public housing apartment, we always had a fresh bowl of nuts in the house, a broken nutcracker, pernil asado, arroz con gandules, and pasteles - a traditional Puerto Rican Christmas food, very much like a Mexican tamale except the masa is made from grated green bananas (occasionally and unintentionally flecked with the skin and blood of those like yours truly assembled and assigned to grate the damned things). Pastele's interior yields a savory stewed pork, wrapped in plantain leaves and paper and tied with string for a festive, Christmas-gift look. My stoic abuelita is said to have made the best, sadly I wouldn't know. I refused to taste them - I suppose the loss of my knuckle skin might have contributed to my distaste for them. As an adult, I learned to adore them on the rare occasion someone's mother or grandmother offered me some and now ironically can't find them anywhere in San Francisco. I try to take the philosophical view about this. It's a form of poetic justice. For 15 years I rejected untasted what the bookmakers in the neighborhood wagered were the finest pasteles in East Harlem. A veritable paragon of pastel-hood were lovingly wrought by my abuelita's hands. I'd make my own but my abuelita's recipes died with her. I don't have the heart to try to recreate her magic. I don't deserve pasteles. I'll eat tamales instead.

Pasteles Filling Before Being Wrapped & Boiled 

Desserts at 421 East 102nd Street Apt. 1-A, NY NY 10029 included an assortment of cookies, puddings and pastries. Store-bought Entenmann's pumpkin and coconut custard pies graced our table (as an interesting aside, William Entenmann was an immigrant from Stuttgart, Germany who arrived on the Brooklyn shoreline in the late 1880, opened a small bakery there and quickly gained notoriety serving prestigious customers... everyone from the Vanderbilts to Frank Sinatra; in the early 50's, William died but his  family created an empire of goodies that still sell well until this day. His is the quintessential American success story). Then there were the more traditional Boricua homemade sweets whipped up by my grandmother, such as: 

Tembleque - a Puerto Rican blancmange made by cooking coconut milk, milk, salt, cornstarch, cinnamon, sugar, cloves, vanilla, and nutmeg or extra flavoring such as rum, orange blossom water and cream of coconut, garnished with mint, cinnamon, almonds, fruit, flavored syrup or chocolate shavings. So silky smooth.  

Arroz con Coco - another humble dessert of rice, coconut milk and spices traditionally made in Puerto Rican households throughout the Christmas season. 

Arroz con Leche - less exotic, more like American rice pudding with raisins, cinnamon and milk; batches of it are made, poured into plates, sprinkled with cinnamon and then shared with neighbors as well as our family. It was too much of a glutinous mess for my delicate palate, though everyone in my family scarfed it up, leaving more tembleque for me.

Tembleque

There was also Budin de Pan (a dense brick-like Puerto Rican Bread Pudding), Dutch butter cookies, Italian Stella D'oro brand amaretti as well as their assortment of cookies with star and flower-shaped pretty pink frosting and a rainbow of sprinkles known as Lady Stella; Guava paste; Turron de Navidad - a traditional Spanish candy consisting of only three ingredients: almonds, honey and egg white, and Dulce de Leche which I could never get enough of... it was a crumbly delicate thing that instantly melted as it felt the heat of your tongue... more like Mexican cajeta, a chalky caramel fudge, than the caramel sauce most non-Puerto Ricans associate with it... Quesitos de Guayaba (sweetened cream cheese and guava Pastries bought from the bakery on 103rd street and Lexington right next to the #6 IRT Subway Station). Of course, even we had the obligatory and ubiquitous Christmas fruitcake of dubious European descent. Every civilized household must.  We had the same tin of fruitcake that we took out annually like all the other Christmas decorations for the first 15 years of my life. We never once considered eating it. Nobody ever opened it! I bet bats or snakes would have flown out if they did. I can't vouch for what happened to it after I left home at that tender age. It may be hidden in the bowels of the old coat closet still waiting for some intrepid explorer to open its tin and immerse himself into a darker knowing.

Beverages flowed and included Egg Nog (which I hated), Coquito (Puerto Rican Egg nog with coconut which I loved), Maví, a tree bark-based beverage grown and widely consumed throughout the Caribbean, it's a certain species in the Colubrina genus including Colubrina elliptica (also called behuco indio) and Colubrina arborescens, a small tree native to the northern Caribbean and south Florida. Mavi is laced with spices, colored with achiote (aniseed). We'd buy it from neighbors who made batches of it with the mavi tree bark, fresh ginger, whole cinnamon, water, sugar & dark brown sugar. More acidic and mouth-puckering than ginger or root beer, it is an acquired taste, but was as indispensable a part of the holiday tradition as the Christmas tree. Malta (which is a sort of yeasty non-alcoholic dark beer which I quaffed instead of soda for years, the brand we used was La Malta Dukesa which had a catchy jingle that I still sing on occasion) was also available for kiddie consumption.

Coquito 

There truly was abundance at this time of year in my home. Three generations of us were there together and all the adults pooled their meager paychecks, welfare checks and pensions to make it a wonderful celebration. I had no inkling we were "poor". We were well-nourished by my grandmother which is another way of saying we were well-loved. Promises and pie crusts are made to be broken, but the people who give you food give you their heart, because love is a delicious dish served warm. She put her entire being into cooking our meals and treats. I suppose that was another reason I never felt loved by my own mother, it wasn't so much her physical and emotional abuse, I think it's that she never once cooked for us.

Of course, our little apartment was crammed with people and the chaos level was high, invariably fights would break out. I remember one Christmas when my grandfather had cashed his pension check and hidden his cache in the angel tree topper but forgot! He accused all and sundry of stealing it, it was like Jericho in there, he brought all the walls down, but I straightened him out before the police arrived - that was my job as a child... the lunatic whisperer. I was actually proud that I could help. I never considered it anything but normal. 

Christmas brings the hibernating child out in so many of us. Holiday traditions abound worldwide as revelers celebrate Solstice, Christmas, Chanukah, Kwaanza or Festivus. When I polled my friends this year to glean further insight into the hows and whats of Christmas desserts, they spoke with anticipatory gustatory relish about sweet treats as varied as Calabrese Christmas Cake (an Italian delicacy that may go back before Christian times, originally made to celebrate a Roman snake goddess with her coils constricted and laced in butter, raisins & cinnamon)... to the lovely delicately powdered, fruit-studded German stollen and its distant cousin Italian Panettone (part cake, part bread); to sturdy sweetmeat nutted and sugar spiked minced pies, so favored from that great island nation of Britain... to Divinity: the nougaty & sublimely named powdery white confection of the American South; to Buche de Noel, the French derived dense ganache-covered Christmas cake rolled with whipped cream, decorated with confectioners' sugar to resemble snow on a Yule log. There is no end to the innovation of the pastry-minded. I, however, intend to offer the homecook three simple variations of a theme - all of them easily adaptable and interchangeable with substituted ingredients, though I have chosen to showcase seasonal fruits: a pumpkin cheesecake with macadamia nut gingersnap crust, a pear and almond crostada, and an apple-chestnut cheesecake tart. Think of them as my Three Magi bearing the gift of Christmas dessert.

A Primer On Pie Crusts ( Pâte Brisée)  

Gingersnap Macadamia Nut Crust

Store-bought pre-made pie doughs and prepared crusts can be substituted for my homemade pie dough, if you need to save time, but it is so easy to make crusts at home it should be your first option. You can also make the dough for the crusts months ahead of time and freeze them. They store perfectly well there as long as you have them wrapped in plastic and slip them in a Ziploc bag and press as much air as you can out of the bags before zipping them. The crust for the crostada and the tart are essentially the same, they are just formed differently. I use a 12' fluted tart pan for the apple-chestnut cheesecake tart, and nothing but a cookie sheet for the crostada. The gingersnap-macadamia nut crust is a snap to make: cookies & nuts pulverized in the food processor with a little additional sugar and melted butter, then the dough is pressed into the bottom of a buttered springform cake pan.

The trick with pie dough made with flour is that it requires time to chill after preparing, ideally for two hours.  You may ask,

"Why do I have to chill my pie dough before I roll it out. After I chill it, it’s too hard to work with?”

 Yes, like many things we kitchen warriors do, it seems unreasonable.  I understand waiting an hour for pie dough to chill feels like you fell into a wormhole, especially since you have to wait 10 minutes after the chilling process to make it pliable enough to roll out again! Well, believe it or not, there is reason to chill the dough, and the reasons are important for maintaining that flaky crust we all look forward to eating. It all has to do with gluten and moisture. By chilling the dough before rolling it out, we allow the present gluten strands time to settle down and relax. This actually makes your pastry dough easier to roll out and cuts down on any shrinking during the baking process. Chilling also lets the available moisture find its way back into all parts of the dough. Something that is hard to achieve while you are mixing the dough together. Chilling the dough also helps the fats in the dough re-solidify, which prevents the gluten from sticking together in one big clump. Rather (if you use the right mixture of fats) you’ll get flat sheets of fat (that make layers and thus flakes) and little balls of fat (that make melt sooner and coat the grains of flour, tender).

Remember, the harder you mix dough the more likely you are to make gluten, which is tough and elastic. That’s great for chewy bread, but bad for tender/flaky pie crust. Making pâte brisée in a food processor sounds easy, doesn't it? Albeit untraditional, you can achieve great results by letting the machine do some of the work. However, it may work too well, so be careful. Using a food processor helps keep the ingredients cooler since you are not subjecting it to the warmth of your hands,  and makes the steps of cutting the butter into the flour and mixing in the water go faster — two major factors when producing a flaky pie crust. But because it does come together so quickly, it can be easy to mix too much and overwork the dough. Pulse the dough and turn out onto your work surface just as the water is incorporated to avoid overworking.

The more the dough is mixed, rolled, and handled, the more the gluten develops. An overworked dough makes it difficult to work with and makes the finished pie crust tough. The crust may also shrink during baking which you can partly prevent by pressing aluminum foil or parchment paper over the crust, then using pie weights, dried beans or poking little vents in the crust with a fork to weight it down and then blind baking it. Blind baking a crust is pre-baking it before adding a filling. Very important when you are using wet ingredients as filling. Another way to keep the crust from shrinking is in the actual mixing process: try not to over-blend the butter when cutting it into the flour. And then, during mixing, only add in enough water as needed to bring the dough together, and only mix until the flour is moistened. It should roll into a ball in the food processor as soon as it is perfectly mixed. Overworked dough typically needs more water to bind everything together, emphasizing the problem even more. Is your dough getting sticky? Toss it into the fridge for a bit instead of adding more flour to overcompensate.

The tart shell, rolled out and chilling in the fridge with pie weights; when it's chilled it is then blind-baked with the pie weights to keep the dough from shrinking. 

 Overall, letting the dough rest in the fridge for at least one hour before rolling it out is a win-win situation with a purpose. Give your dough the time it needs. There's plenty to be done during that time in or out of the kitchen.

Now the doughs I am making here are shortbread crusts which are a bit sturdier and more forgiving. The additional sugar and butter makes them taste like butter cookies, they are the perfect crust for fruit tarts and cheesecakes because they can withstand the moisture of the fillings. For the apple-chestnut cheesecake tart I also added a TBS of sour cream in with the water. As an aside,  the history of shortbread goes back to at least the 12th century and originally started life as ‘biscuit bread’; biscuits that were made from left-over bread dough that was sometimes sweetened and dried out in the oven to form a hard, dry rusk. This practise took place over the whole of the British Isles, not just Scotland. Over time the leavening was lost and exchanged for butter, making it an expensive fancy treat that was only bought for celebrations such as Christmas and Hogsmanay (Scottish New Year). There are similar ‘breads’ outside of Scotland such as Shrewsbury cakes and Goosnagh cakes. The large amount of butter is what makes shortbread short: the term short, when applied to biscuits and pastry, means crumbly, like shortcrust pastry should be. It is the reason why the fat added to biscuits and pastries is called shortening. Today, shortbread is made from flour, butter and sugar, though other flavourings are added. Caraway was particularly popular; Mary Queen of Scots was particularly fond of them. Other extra ingredients included almonds and citrus fruits like this 18th century recipe from Mrs Frazer:

 Take a peck of flour…beat and sift a pound of sugar; take orange-peel, citron, and blanched almonds, of each half a pound, cut in pretty long thin pieces: mix these well in the flour; then make a hole in the middle of the flour, put in three table-spoons of good yeast; then work it up, but not too much…roll out; prickle them on top, pinch them neat round the edges, and strew sugar, carraways, peel, and citron, on the top. Fire it…in a moderate oven.

Pear Crostada

Out of the three, the pear crostada is the quickest and easiest to make. The crostada is a looser construction than its tart sister, she is something of a hippy: it's  basically just rolled out into a rough 12 inch circle, the center of which is then filled with ground almonds & fruit with a large enough border around it to allow you to fold the dough around it. I cut the butter into small dice and then put it in the freezer to keep it as cold as possible.  Don’t worry about rolling, folding and pleating the crust perfectly—its free-form nature is one of its many charms. Serve with softly whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. 

Essentially, I sliced three Bartlett pears, put them in a bowl, added a squeeze of lemon, a handful of brown sugar, a generous dusting of cinnamon, a pinch of ginger & some freshly ground almonds (I used the coffee grinder to grind them to meal, but not paste). 1-1/4 cup of flour, a stick plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter (10 tablespoons), I also added 2 TBS of sugar and a 1/4 cup of almond meal to the pate brisee dough because I like my pastry dough a little sweet... that adds humectants to the dough which means I used less than a 1/4 cup of iced water, I actually made the dough in the food processor and cooled it in the freezer for 15 minutes after rolling it into a ball and flattening it into a disc...

Ingredients

 Pastry: 

• 1  cup all-purpose flour 
• 1/4 cup of freshly ground unsalted almonds
• 2 Tablespoons sugar 
• 1/2 teaspoon salt 
• 1 stick plus 2 Tablespoons unsalted butter (10 TBS total), chilled and cut in small pieces
• 2 Tablespoons sour cream 
• 3 to 4 Tablespoons ice water 

Filling:

• 4 firm-ripe Bosc or Bartlett pears (about 1 1/2 pounds) halved, cored and quartered, each quarter cut in 3 slices 
• 1/2 cup freshly ground almonds
• 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice 
• 1/2 cup brown sugar 
• 2 tablespoons flour or cornstarch
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon 
• 1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger
• 1 pinch freshly ground nutmeg 
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1Tablespoon unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
• 1 Tablespoon of milk or cream

 Instructions 

For the pastry: 

Combine flour, sugar and salt in a food processor bowl
Cut butter in until the dry dough resembles cornmeal.
Quickly pulse in sour cream and up 3 to 4 tablespoons ice water—adding 1 Tablespoon at a time, just enough so mixture barely begins to hold together, and rolls into a ball
Remove from food processor
Pat into a disc, cover with plastic wrap; refrigerate 2 hours.

When chilled, pull out of the fridge, let dough rest at room temperature 5 -10 minutes.
Roll dough out on a sheet of parchment paper to a 12-inch circle, and roughly trim (it needn’t be perfect).

Slide parchment onto a baking sheet and chill 30 minutes in refrigerator.

Preheat oven to 400F.


For the filling: 

Toss pears with lemon juice in a medium bowl. Combine sugar with flour, almonds, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg in a small bowl. Sprinkle over pears; toss gently. Add vanilla; toss again. Arrange pear filling in center of pastry to within 1 1/2 inches of the edges. Working quickly, fold and pleat edges of dough up and over pears. Dot pears with butter, brush top of pastry with milk, and sprinkle remaining 1½ teaspoons sugar over top of pastry and pears. Bake 40 minutes, or until pastry is golden and pears are tender. Let cool 10 minutes before slicing.

Pumpkin Cheesecake w/
Gingersnap Macadamia Nut Crust

I HIGHLY recommend having pumpkin cheesecake with a gingersnap-macadamia nut crust for breakfast. It is life-altering. Subbing out a cup of sour cream for a cup of cream cheese was HUGE value add... it made it so silky and gave it a tiny bit of bite... so was using molasses in the batter, more depth of flavor than plain granulated sugar, though naturally I was forced to use plain sugar, too. This cheesecake originally called for 4 packages of cream cheese...I used 3-1/2 plus 1 cup sour cream. The recipe also initially called for a graham cracker crust, but that is sooooo boring. I used gingersnap cookies and macadamia nuts instead. I also added ginger, cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg to the crumbs after pulverizing them in my food processor. This recipe calls for patience. The assembly of it is a snap, but that two hour time period of resting in the oven after baking with the temperature off is essential to keeping the surface from cracking. I also added a pan of boiling hot water on a lower rack in the oven to keep the oven humid which also prevents the pumpkin custard from cracking while it cooks. Make it the night before you want to serve it. Then you won't feel rushed.



INGREDIENTS FOR THE CRUST

• 1 1/4 cups ginger snap cookies 
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar 
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted 
• 1/2 cup macadamia nuts
• 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon allspice
• 1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

FOR THE FILLING 

• 3 packages (8 ounces each) bar cream cheese, very soft
• 1 cup sour cream
• 3/4 cups granulated sugar 
• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 15 oz can of pumpkin puree 
• 1/3 cup of molasses
• 1 Tablespoon cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon allspice
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract 
• 1/2 teaspoon salt 
• 4 large eggs, room temperature 

DIRECTIONS 

 Preheat oven to 350 degrees, with 1 rack in center. 1 rack in the bottom.
Assemble a 9-inch nonstick springform pan, with the raised side of the bottom part facing up. 


Make the crust: 

In a food processor, pulse ginger snaps, sugar, and macadamia nuts until crumbly
Add melted butter until moistened; remove from food processor, press firmly into bottom of the buttered pan. Bake until golden around edges, 10 to 12 minutes. 

Make the filling: 

With an electric mixer, beat cream cheese, sour cream and sugar on low speed until smooth;

Add pumpkin puree, molasses, pie spice, vanilla, and salt; mix just until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, mixing until each is incorporated before adding the next. Mix in flour (do not overmix).

Place springform pan on a rimmed baking sheet. Pour filling into springform, and gently smooth top. Heat water in a tea kettle, pour into a roasting pan. Transfer both pans to oven; placing the water pan in the lowest rack and the cake pan on the center rack; reduce oven heat to 300 degrees. Bake 45 minutes without opening the oven. Turn off oven; to prevent the top from cracking, let cheesecake stay in oven 2 hours more (without opening). Remove from oven; cool completely. Cover with plastic wrap; refrigerate until firm, at least 4 hours. Unmold before serving.

Apple-Chestnut Cheesecake Tart

Okay, so... I still had apples, half a jar of chestnuts, half a package of cream cheese, Greek yogurt, an egg, and a little creme fraiche leftover from Thanksgiving. I was feeling creative and thrifty and opted to wing an apple-chestnut cheesecake tart with the available ingredients. Tis very much of the season.  This is the most labor intensive of the three desserts, but only because the three part filling must be prepared separately before adding them together. It's a fairly straightforward assembly. The actual technique required is elementary and the lush cheesecake custard perfumed by the aromatic and rich chestnut cream is sublime, add the tart sweetness and texture of the apples and you have the best there is to enjoy of winter's mellow fruitfulness... You can make this all apple, or all pear. I just used what I had, but I absolutely loved the combination.  

Ingredients

Pastry: 

• 1-1/4  cup all-purpose flour 
• 2 Tablespoons sugar 
• 1/2 teaspoon salt 
• 1 stick plus 2 Tablespoons unsalted butter (10 TBS total), chilled and cut in small pieces
• 2 Tablespoons sour cream 
• 3 to 4 Tablespoons ice water 
• 1 fluted 12 inch tart pan 

Filling

Ingredients for the Chestnut Cream:

• 7 ounces jar roasted, peeled chestnuts 
• 3/4  cup half and half or heavy cream 
• ⅓ cup granulated sugar 
• 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt 
• 1 vanilla bean, split or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• a couple of generous splashes of Sweet Marsala

Ingredients for the Cheesecake Batter:

Note: Everything must be brought to room temperature before mixing

• 4 oz of cream cheese
• 1/3 cup of creme fraiche
• 1 cup of Greek Yogurt
• 2 TBS granulated sugar
• 1 large egg 

Ingredients for Fruit Topping

• 3 Gala apples, peeled, cored & sliced 1/4 inch thick 
• 1 Bosc pear,  peeled, cored & sliced 1/4 inch thick
• 2 TBS fresh lemon juice ( I used a Meyer lemon, much sweeter)
• 2 TBS granulated sugar
• 1 TBS cinnamon
• 1 TBS cornstarch
  
  
  
  Ingredients for Glaze

• 1 TBS sugar
• 1 TBS unsalted butter 
• 1 teaspoon water

Instructions 

MAKE THE PIE CRUST:

Combine flour, sugar and salt in a food processor bowl
Cut butter in until the dry dough resembles cornmeal.
Quickly pulse in sour cream and up 3 to 4 tablespoons ice water—adding 1 Tablespoon at a time, just enough so mixture barely begins to hold together, and rolls into a ball
Remove from food processor
Pat into a disc, cover with plastic wrap; refrigerate 2 hours.

When chilled, pull out of the fridge, let dough rest at room temperature 5 -10 minutes.
Roll dough out on a sheet of parchment paper or plastic wrap to a 14-inch circle

Place crust parchment/plastic wrap side up into tart pan, firmly pressing dough into the fluted edges and bottom, and chill 30 minutes in refrigerator.

Preheat oven to 400F. Be sure to have a rack in the center. 

When dough is chilled, place a sheet of aluminum foil or parchment paper enough to cover entire surface and sides of pan over dough, cover surface with  pie weights or dried beans and blind bake for 25 minutes. Remove from oven. Remove foil & pie weights. Set aside.


MAKE THE FILLING:

Combine apples, pear, lemon juice, cinnamon and sugar and cornstarch. Set aside.

Simmering chestnuts in half and half, sugar, vanilla, marsala, a pinch of sea salt, and cinnamon until they are soft (about 20 minutes), then puree them into a chestnut cream; set aside and let cool...

Meanwhile, make cream cheese batter by processing cream cheese, creme fraiche, and Greek yogurt with sugar until mixture is silky smooth and shimmering, then blend in egg until just combined and add cooled chestnut puree to batter until well mixed.


ASSEMBLE TART:

1. Lower oven temperature to 350 degrees.
2. Place tart tin on a baking sheet, fill with chestnut cream cheese cake batter.
3. Smooth batter.
4. Starting from the outside edge, gently lay the apple-pear slices one at a time slightly overlapping the edges, working your way into concentric circles, until you have completely covered the top of the tart. 
5. Place pan in the center rack of the oven.
6. Bake undisturbed for 45 minutes.
7. While tart is baking making the glaze by combining butter, sugar & water in a small heavy bottomed pan over medium heat. Using a heat-proof pastry brush, combine ingredients, bring to a boil, stirring gently but constantly, until butter & sugar become viscous, but not brown.  
8. After 45 minutes, remove tart from oven to glaze fruit with sugar mixture; using pastry basting brush. Cover surface thoroughly.
9. When completely glazed, return tart to oven for an additional 15 minutes or until knife inserted into center of tart comes out clean & fruit is golden. 
10. When tart is done, turn off oven, allow tart to cool undisturbed in oven for an hour or so. Then remove from oven. Chill tart for a minimum of four hours before serving.  

Merry Christmas!

The authoress as a sweet little cherub in the St. Lucy's School Christmas Pageant