Pear Tart attempt

I have no idea where I bought this can of "almond pastry filling" but this is what it looked like when I opened it and then mixed it up a bit...

I was going to do something that you are told never to do when bringing dessert to a dinner party...

and that is to bring something you've never made or tested out before. So, I did have a back up plan in case this pastry experiment completely sucked. Plan B was vanilla ice cream with homemade dulce de leche sauce (made by C of CAB Cooks, not me) and chocolate sauce for Manitoulin Island, which would be topped with crumbled almond thin cookies.

This semi-ambitious and ambiguous recipe involved these items:

I looked up various 'pear tart' and 'pear puff pastry' recipes online and thought I could just combine the best parts of the recipes I liked. See the ingredients above? I didn't even use the creme fraiche (which by the way is damn expensive - $4.99 at Fresh & Easy). I didn't use my normal Indo-European puff pastry squares. I should have though. These puff pastry sheets from Pepperidge Farm didn't perform like I thought they would.

Pear Tarts
(adapted and semi mangled by yours truly)

Ingredients:
Puff Pastry
butter
sugar
pears
almond pastry filling

I cut the sheets into squares. Each sheet yielded 9 squares (18 total).

I spread the almond filling on top of the puff pastry squares which as you can see weren't cut into perfect squares.

I thinly sliced some pears (these are the yellow ones with a tinge of pink - they smell so good when ripe!) and arranged them on top of the filling. They're not prettily fanned out but you could do that if you wanted to.

As a topping, I had some softened butter and added sugar to it, then added little dots of the butter/sugar mixture on top of the pears.

Lastly, I sprinkled a tiny bit of sugar (the kind I used had large pretty crystal looking grains) on top, then I popped it into the oven.

This is where it went kind of wrong. Since I had looked at several recipes, for some reason, 350 F stuck in my mind, so that's what I did. Then I winged the time in the oven. I started off with 15 minutes but it didn't seem like it had risen enough. I didn't realize until later that it should have been a higher temp (like 400). So I put it back in for another 6 minutes and it almost got burnt!

Our dinner party with the neighbors was just minutes away and I wasn't sure if I should serve these pear tarts or not...

Bert and TC both thought the tarts looked quite all right and that it would be appreciated by our neighbors.  They turned out to be the hit that night, so I was relieved it wasn't a total fail. The tarts didn't puff up as high as I'd liked but I think if I used my normal brand of puff pastry, it would have.  Armed with both my plan A dessert (this one) and plan B (the ice cream with sauces and almond thins), we crossed the street with warm tarts lined up on our tray.

I want to try this recipe again with bigger puff pastry squares and instead of using almond pastry filling, I want to glaze the pears with a passionfruit or apricot jelly.  But hey, this was just a first try and there's always room for improvement.

We were excited for a homemade Mexican mariscos dinner...that post coming right up!