I don't want to talk about it.

Let's talk about these instead:

Two 6" tartlets, one lemon and one plum, made for my mother's birthday.

I realize that I have been known to say, in tones self-assured and perhaps a little strident, that only young children, small and furry animals, and maybe dollhouse furniture could be termed cute. I'm not redacting that statement, but I would like to add 6" tartlets with golden-brown crusts and glossy fruit fillings to the list. These tarts were pretty darn cute, and tasty, too.

Summer in my little corner of Texas is hot. Really hot. Too hot for frosting, which melts at room temperature, and too hot for any of those rich winter desserts that are heavy with cream and eggs and preserved fruit. No problem, say the West Coast food bloggers, merrily posting pictures of a king's ransom in berries and stone fruits. Problem, say we who wilt and whither in months of drought and eternal sunshine. In a bad year, which this was, the local peach season is over by August, and the supermarket offerings are never quite as good. The blackberry bushes are exhausted even earlier, and that's it for the major local crops. In August it's still possible to find peaches and some berries-- I don't envy September birthdays.

I bought a little bag of plums grown in northern New Mexico at the Santa Fe farmers' market, and manfully resisted eating them before arriving home. The plan for the peach fiasco was to use a fresh peach for aesthetics and previously frozen peaches for flavour, but when I was finally forced to admit my folly I found a lemon kicking around the vegetable drawer and made another tart with it.

I used Dorie Greenspan's paté sablée from Baking from My Home to Yours for the crusts and SmittenKitchen's recipe for the whole lemon tart filling. I found the filling a bit too sweet, and would cut the sugar by a tablespoon or two, but there were no complaints from the peanut gallery. The plum tart is basically Rose Levy Berenbaum's Plum Flame Tart in The Pie and Pastry Bible, with completely invented amounts and proportions. It's just plums barely sprinkled with sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg and then glazed with apricot preserves. (General consensus was that I could have used a little more sugar-- the birthday girl found the tart "ascetic.") The disaster peach upside-down cake is David Lebovitz's, but the disaster part is all mine: the pan was too small, which I knew before I put the batter in, but forged ahead anyway, hoping the universe would surprise me by editing physics and chemistry. I may try it again-- brown sugar! peaches! cake!-- but not, I think, until the smart of failure has faded.