Waiting For Peaches

My little peach tree is rather sad this year. It rained when the flowers were blooming, so just a few peaches were set. It also is struggling with peach leaf curl without any assistance from me - I'm a bad steward. But it is game - slowly, the six peaches it set this year are ripening.

I got impatient, as I do every year. My tree is a late variety so there are fat, juicy peaches in the markets weeks before my homegrown ones are ready. I finally succumbed to three store bought beauties this week and decided to make a croustade from them.

When you use Star Dough, as I do with pride because it is headquartered here in our small town, making a croustade is a snap.

All I did was roll out the dough (it is wrapped in plastic, so your rolling pin doesn't even get dirty), skim off the top plastic and place on a rimmed baking sheet, remove the other plastic, top the middle 2/3 with crushed amaretti cookies, lay in the sugared and seasoned fruit (to your taste - I like scant sugar), and carefully fold up the pastry to partially surround the fruit, pinching to seal any holes. Bake at 400 for about 45 minutes and you've got a lovely dessert. My pastry leaked juice, so I took that and brushed it over the fruit and the pastry, then sprinkled a little more coarse sugar over it. The juice caused the sugar to stick to the pastry and gave it a subtle little shine and twinkle.

The croustade tasted mostly of sweet, ripe peaches with a hint of buttery crust. One of the nice things about using Star Dough is that it's already rolled out very thin, so you don't have a heavy lump of crust.

I'm off to the farmer's market again this afternoon, in search of peaches and blackberries for another croustade. Star Dough comes with two crusts in each package and I'm not waiting for my own peaches to use up that second pastry. Too impatient.