Mr W is partial to dessert so tonight I indulged him. We had some sweet wine left which is horrible for drinking

so I used it to poach some peeled, quartered and cored pears, along with butter, sugar, ground cinnamon and a dash of lemon juice. The pear was then removed from the liquid which was left simmering to thicken.
The sweet pastry was taken from a chocolate tart recipe that I used in July. Back then I battled with rolling out the pastry for hours because it tore so easily. Tonight I cheated; I rolled out small pieces of pastry and simply patched them together in the orange silicon pie dish. It worked much better than I expected, though I did overcook the pastry slightly during blind baking. After the pastry case had cooled the poached pear segments were arranged in the case and the concentrated winey syrup poured over:

On cutting into slices the liquid escaped a little but no matter. I served each slice with a generous mound of whipped double cream:

22 Apr 2012

Poached some pears and found that 200g caster sugar for 4 pears is enough.

3 Mar 2013

I made the original recipe chocolate tart a few months ago and found that, when blind baking, some of the pastry came away on the naked baking parchment. This time I buttered the baking parchment but it still happened. I’ve just watched a Rick Stein programme where he says you should use a GREASEPROOF sheet after scrunching it up so it goes all the way to the edges.

I still can’t lift the pastry after rolling without breaking it. Mary Berry has a method that she uses when making tarte au citron but you need a loose-bottomed flan dish for that. Maybe I should roll the pastry out directly onto the scrunched up greaseproof paper?