Blue Cayenne

This is a sweet little tart. Easy, too. It is a Peach and Plum Frangipane Tart from Hetal Vasavada’s new cookbook, Desi Bakes.

Over the decade that I’ve been writing Blue Cayenne, I’ve posted innumerable recipes for stone fruit dishes. To me, stone fruits are a culinary gift of the gods–sweet with a pleasant bit of tang, juicy, texturally intersting and on and on. There are the bright beautiful colors, too. 

Technically, stone fruits are drupes–a fleshy fruit with a hard stony pit. This category of fruits includes all the usual suspects–peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots, cherries, mangoes. But there are ever so many more choices in the stone fruit world!

There are hybrids, for example. Consider  pluots, apriums and pluerries.  In the hybridizing of these fruits, scientists put their thumb on the scale favoring a specific drupe. The pluot, for example, leans toward the plum while the aprium gives the apricot star billing. Then there are the pleurries! What? A pleurry is a cross between a plum and a cherry. It is sometimes advertised as being “sweet like a cherry with the summer fresh plum zing.” Wow!

Some berries are drupes, too. Blackberries and raspberries, for instance, are aggregate drupes, made up as they are of clusters of individual drupes, each one having a tiny pit in its center.

Surprisingly, drupes include olives, dates, coconuts, almonds, and walnuts. Who knew that there was any relationship whatsoever between that beautiful Santa Rosa plum on your plate and the olive in your martini? 

How to select your stone fruits at their peak of sweetness? The experts suggest following the scent. That’s right. Sniff the fruit for a sweet scent. Another clue for sweetness, look for wrinkling of the fruit’s skin at the stem. 

In addition to today’s recipe for Peach and Plum Frangipane Tart, here are some stone fruit recipes from Blue Cayenne’s archives. Why not truly embrace stone fruit season and dive into the many great recipes that incorporate the fruit? 

Peach and Raspberry Salad

Almond Apricot Cake

The Peach and Plum Frangipane Tart recipe  being featured today on Blue Cayenne comes from Hetal Vasavada’s new cookbook, Desi Bakes. You can order the book through your local bookstore or on Amazon here.

Here is the recipe for Peach and Plum Frangipane Tart as I prepared it in my kitchen. 

The honey cake is considered the fruitcake of the kosher kitchen. That is…it is not always appreciated.

I don’t think you will feel that way about this sweet cake, though. 

This honey cake is deliciously spiced with cinnamon and vanilla, sweetened with honey and brown and white sugars, and given just a wee bit of a bitter edge with orange juice. I enjoyed it to the very last bite. 

This recipe is from Dobre, Dobre, a cookbook about Polish baking by Laurel Kratochvila. You can order the cookbook through your local bookstore or on Amazon here..

We’ve featured a recipe on Blue Cayenne before, so you have two interesting variations on this them to choose from. The previous honey cake recipe featured slightly different spices and a bit of whiskey. You will find that recipe here. Here is a photo of that beautiful cake.

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. 

Every month Blue Cayenne features recipes from our archive of more than four hundred recipes. These recipes are our “Oldies But Goodies.” Today’s Oldies But Goodies recipe is for Crispy Oyster Mushroom Skewers With Crushed Chickpeas. It’s a keeper. Here is the link: Crispy Oyster Mushroom Skewers.

Want to dive deeper into our recipe archive? Just click one of the categories at the top of this page or use the category search drop down menu on the right side of this page.

And…here is a link to Blue Cayenne’s main page: Blue Cayenne Food and Photography Blog. If you are in the mood to cook (or eat!), we hope you will take a moment to look at the many excellent recipes we have featured.