Recipe - Crumbly Sweet Pastry (Pate Sablee) With Almonds

8 tablespoon (1 stick) unsalted butter,
Softened
1 cup Plus 6 tablespoons
Confectioner's sugar, sifted
1 Egg
1 teaspoon Salt
1 One fourth cup All purpose flour
One half cup Ground almonds

In an electric mixer, cream together butter and sugar until light and
fluffy. Add egg and salt and beat until combined. Stir together flour and
almonds and add to butter mixture. Slowly mix just until flour is evenly
moistened. Do not let it form a ball. Remove dough from bowl onto a
lightly floured work surface and form into 2 balls. Flatten each ball into
a disk, wrap well, and refrigerate a minimum of four hours or as long as 4
days .

Yield: 2 9 to 10 inch tart shells

These two different pastry doughs have very different textures. The first
is flaky due to the incorporation of butter in small pieces: as the dough
cooks, the butter melts and the water in it turns to steam and puffs up the
dough. The second dough is tender and crumbly: the butter is well creamed
as for a cookie; the confectioner's sugar adds tenderness due to the
cornstarch it contains; the ground almonds, which can be substituted for
some of the flour in any pastry dough recipe, add an interesting
graininess.

TOO HOT TAMALES SHOW #TH6296
Posted to MMRecipes Digest V5 #029 by muddy@ibm.net on Jan 28, 98