Your Best Fruit Tart

Cutting the butter and then rechilling it helps ensure a flaky crust.

Pulsing the flour and salt, and then adding the butter until it's well combined.

Slowly adding ice water, until it just comes together.

This looks like it could use a few more pulses, but resist the urge. Amanda has a great trick for combining the dough that avoids the risk of overworking it.

Amanda, master of doughs, lightly piles it onto a piece of plastic wrap, covers it, and forms a disc of dough within the plastic.

It goes into the fridge overnight (or for at least an hour).

Amanda liberally flours the working surface, and rolls it out to 1/8" thick.

At JackieK's suggestion, we place a 9-inch plate over the dough, and cut around it to form the perfect disc.

We crimp the edges to form a rim, put foil over it, fill it with beans, and apply an egg wash. We bake it for 8 minutes, remove the foil (and beans), and dock the dough by pricking it with a fork.

We put it back in the oven for 10 minutes and end up with a beautiful disc of crust.

For the filling, we caramelize some onions...

... and slice some plums. (Like JackieK, we found that the firmer plums work the best.)

We sautée the plums lightly in butter and add 1 teaspoon of sugar to lightly caramelize them.

Though the recipe called for 1 tablespoon of mascarpone, we use 2 tablespoons to adequately cover the tart crust.

The resulting tart is as beautiful as it is delicious.

This tart dough avoids all that is scary about tart doughs -- no rolling! No cold butter!

The warm butter is just barely mixed into the sugar, salt, vanilla extract, and flour...

...and pressed into the tart pan.

Start by working the dough out from the middle, and then slowly up the sides. You'll want to have the dough hang over the top of the pan's edges a touch, as it'll contract during baking. The dough is very wet and greasy feeling. This is OK! We put it in the fridge for a moment to tighten it back up.

After it comes out of the fridge, we weighed it down with pie weights (or dal, as the case may be) and blind baked it for 8-10 minutes. This wasn't specified, but is a good way to ensure your dough cooks without puffing up.

As the crust bakes, we chop the fruit. Or rather, Merrill chops fruit, and Amanda tastes it.

We decided to play it risky and juice the lemon straight over the fruit.

Stupid. Those seeds are awfully slippery.

To make the crisp topping, you simply throw all the ingredients together, and work it into a crumbly texture with your fingertips.

When filling the tart, be sure to lift the fruit out of the accumulated liquid, otherwise your lovingly blind-baked crust will become a soggy mass.

The tart baked for about 35 minutes, until the center was bubbly and the crust and the topping were golden brown.