It’s late September, and on the farm the Italian plums are finally ripe! We had so many this year and I could only make so much jam – so I decided to try my hand with a dessert. I didn’t have time to go to the store since I was in the middle of making 18 gallons of jam, so I did a quick search for recipes I could make with what I had on hand.
We always have eggs (because of our chickens) and happen to drink heavy cream in our coffee, so I decided a custard tart would be fun. I also happened to have a frozen pie crust in the freezer, which saved a ton of time. I then cobbled together a few different recipes to come up with something that would work.
As I was pulling ingredients together, my husband walked in the kitchen with a huge bowl of blackberries he’d just picked – so I decided to add them to the tart as well. As I was washing everything I thought “these plums and blackberries are so *purpley*!” and then of course my mind immediately filled in “You know what else is purple that you have a ton of?” – so then I added culinary lavender to the recipe for a Perfect Purple Trifecta. Finally, I decided to sub out the granulated sugar for honey, since we’d just harvested honey from our bees and had a ton. So I had a ”Mostly My Farm to My Mouth” tart, which I felt pretty smug about. I decided if it turned out yummy I would share the recipe on my blog.
You guessed it (since here’s the blog) It turned out amazing! The blackberries add a lovely tartness to the sweet custard and plums, and the lavender rounds out the flavor with a very light floral undernote. Next time I’m going to try it with a homemade crust, and do individual small tarts (I’m thinking one plum per tartlett). Let me know what you think!
Lavender Blackberry Italian Plum Tart Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 pie crust (store bought or made from your favorite recipe)
- 4-6 plums, halved and pitted (depending on size of your pan)
- 1 C blackberries
- ½ C heavy cream
- 3 tbsp honey (can sub ⅓ C white sugar)
- 1 egg
- 2 tbsp brown sugar
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tbsp ground culinary lavender bud*
*Be sure to finely grind the lavender – it doesn’t taste good to bite into a full lavender bud. Also, all the other recipes I looked at called for cinnamon or nutmeg (or a combo) – so if you don’t have culinary lavender on hand, these spices are fine to use instead.
Directions
Oven: 375
- Prepare crust: grease tart pan or pie pan and roll out crust, placing in pan – if frozen, thaw according to directions
- Prepare fruit: wash and halve/pit plums, wash blackberries and dry.
- Toss plums in bowl with brown sugar and lemon juice
- Place plums cut side up in pie crust, evenly spaced, and bake for 15 minutes
- Whisk cream, egg, honey, vanilla and lavender until thoroughly mixed. If you’d like, you can drain the remainder of the lemon/sugar plum mix and blackberry juice into the mixture and whisk that in.
- When ready, remove crust from oven
- With your fingers, carefully arrange blackberries around plums
- Pour custard mixture over top
- Bake approx 20 minutes until custard is set (no longer jiggly)
- Let rest for 10 minutes before serving
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