Poached Pear Clafoutis

so precious that i had to drive with the clafoutis on my lap

baked clafoutis!

arrangement

slicing the poached pears

poaching the pears

rolling the dough

making pate sucree the night before

I recently splurged on Michel Roux's book "Pastry", which I've been happily devouring for the last two days.  French pastry is so charming!  So here is my first attempt at both making a pate sucree dough and a poached pear clafoutis.  I made two: one for my mother's office staff and one for my aunt who recently hurt her back and obviously nothing heals the body quite like copious amounts of butter and sugar.  

The results of a beginner's attempt: Clearly my pate sucree tart could afford to be more delicate but let's just say I was going for the "rustic" look.  Yeah.  The clafoutis was very light, airy, a lovely custard-y flavor.  This took a lot of work though, and I'm working on 4 hours of sleep because of it.  Delivering the clafoutis made me really anxious.  I kept imagining them flying around in my car and breaking apart, and me--terribly deflated.  But I couldn't cover them to keep them in place on their plates because then the pretty fluff of the egg batter would collapse.  So I drove with the clafoutis very lovingly in my lap.  I felt very protective.