Torta di Pere da Pietro

Torta di Pere da Pietro

• 6 May 2009

A special occasion requires a special cake, so I pulled out all the stops last Sunday. I was going to a birthday party and at the last moment decided to make a pear torte. The recipe comes from Cafe e Cucina in Melbourne and was featured in an old issue of Gourmet Traveller magazine. I've made the torte a few times before and remember the recipe being a bit time consuming but not difficult.



The torte consists of a pastry shell, a layer of creme patisserie, a layer of sliced pears and a topping of almond cake. It's one of those recipes which requires time and patience and both were in short supply on Saturday.



So what went wrong? Everything. I had trouble hunting down ripe pears/the creme patisserie went lumpy/the pastry wouldn't stick to the tin/the gas oven went out halfway through the process so it took hours for the torte to cook, then once the cake cooled, it pulled away from the pastry.



Thankfully a good dusting of icing sugar covers a multitude of sins and apparently my rustic looking torte tasted much better than it looked. My lesson - allow 2 days to prepare this torte in the future or make something a little less complicated when time poor.

Jillian