Double Sugar Peach Tarts

Late summer loveliness

Aug 19, 2025

Double Sugar Peach Tarts

Life Lessons: when you have a dream in your head of peach tarts made from the last of the summer peaches, never ask a teenage boy to go and buy the peaches for you. Not this teenage boy, anyway.

The minute he sets off, vacating his spot on the sofa where he was watching sport, you will wonder whether he actually remembers the difference between a peach and a nectarine and a plum (this is a boy who only absorbs details on a ‘need to know’ basis and once pointed at a daffodil in a jar on the kitchen table and asked you what it was). You will cast your mind back to reading him the board book of Each Peach Pear Plum over and over again when he was tiny and hope that some of it went in.

He will drop three of the peaches on the way out of the shop and they will end up so bruised that half of them are unusable and fruit flies will cluster round the brown paper bag putting you off the whole idea of cooking. You will think: this is why I end up doing everything around the house. And then you stop yourself and remember all the times he has in fact weeded the garden /hoovered his brother’s bedroom/cooked himself pasta when you were out working (and lately, he’s even washed up the encrusted pans rather than leaving them for you as a nice surprise on your return). He walks the dog, despite regularly telling you that it was a mistake ever to get a family pet. For the four years since his older sister left for college, it has been mostly just him and you in the house. His dad left a year before that.

Life Lessons: Always ask a teenage boy to go and buy peaches for you. Especially this teenage boy. Apart from anything else, it will teach you that good parts can be salvaged from underneath the bruises. And – in this long and dusty post-exam and pre-results summer - it will also teach him that he doesn’t need you as much as you both think. When he’s out late with friends, you sometimes ask him if he will be careful on the roads (for sometimes read: always). ‘No, I will cycle home as recklessly as I can and forget my lights’, is his deadpan reply.

While he is gone buying the peaches, it will win you half an hour of glorious peace because although the shop is only ten minutes away, he will spend ages, first searching for the fruit section and then searching for the peaches among all the other fruits until he is sure he has the thing you asked for. Shiny and purple? No. Pinkish and fuzzy? Yes.

Bruised peaches are still a far better thing than no peaches. When you slice the fruit, carving off the brown parts, you discover that he has actually chosen well and that the flesh underneath is honeyed and juicy with the creamy-peachy scent that speaks so fleetingly of late summer.

And you will slice the peaches and lay them on some pastry you made the day before and sprinkle sugar over and bake them to sticky sweetness. And when he takes the first bite, he will tell you with conviction that these tarts are great, better than the experimental batch you made the other day. You hear a pride in his voice because these were his peaches. And you realise you need to let go more.

RECIPE: Double Sugar Peach Tarts

The big news here – or at least it was news to me – is that you don’t have to peel peaches before you add them to a tart. The peaches de-fuzz themselves as they bake and skipping the peeling stage gets you to fruit tart heaven so much quicker.

Despite the name, these are not actually very sugary. They contain 2 teaspoons of added sugar per tart (and yes, I know that peaches also contain their own sugar). But I’ve added sugar to the recipe title because apart from fruit and pastry, sugar is the only ingredient. I add white sugar underneath the fruit and some crunchy demerara on top. If your palate is not very sweet, you could easily cut the amount of both sugars in half but I like it best when the peach juices go a little syrupy. As always, adjust the amount of sugar to your fruit, tasting it raw first (some peaches are so much sweeter than others) and if you feel your peaches lack acidity, add a squeeze of lemon.

It was the brilliant Jeremy Lee – whom I think of as the king of puddings – whose cookbook introduced me to the joy of making individual fruit tarts with no added frangipane or jam or other filling. His tarts are round and made with apples plus sugar and butter. Mine are square so you don’t even have to use a cutter – just a knife. And I arrange my peaches with less precision than his apples, adding no butter (unlike apples, they are so juicy that they don’t seem to need any).

They are the easiest fruit tart I’ve ever made. I love them equally when they are warm and syrupy or when they are cold and ever so slightly soggy for breakfast the next day (in this form they remind me of a divine peach cobbler I used to buy from a shop in Philadelphia that sold nothing but carrot cake and peach cobbler; this was a cobbler made with pastry, not the usual scone-type cobbler topping).

I made these with a yoghurt rough puff pastry adapted from Beatrix Bakes: Another Slice by Nathalie Paull, an Australian baking book I am obsessed with. But use any recipe for rough puff pastry that you favour (Jeremy has a great one, of course) or use ready-made all-butter puff for ease.

For each tart/each person

50g rough puff pastry or ready-made all butter puff pastry

1 ripe peach, white or yellow

1 tsp caster sugar

1 tsp demerara sugar

Optional: the zest of a lime or a grating of nutmeg

Wash the peaches and remove any bruised parts. Cut each one into wedges, aiming for at least 8 wedges per peach. If the peaches were very bruised, you may have juicy fragments more than wedges, but no matter. Roll the pastry out thinly – if you do this between two sheets of very lightly floured baking parchment, it’s much easier, especially if you are not sure if anyone left crumbs on the kitchen table. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. Cut the pastry into squares about 12cm by 12cm (I do actually get a tape measure out here for the first one to get my eye in but as you can see below, my idea of a ‘square’ would not please a mathematician) and arrange them on a parchment lined tray or trays.

Sprinkle the caster sugar evenly over each pastry square and then top with the peach wedges. Bake for 15 minutes, then sprinkle with demerara and bake for another 10 minutes or until golden and puffy. If you like, you can grate over a little lime zest or sprinkle with a grating of nutmeg. I go to and fro on whether I like them best with or without the lime.

Don’t worry if the peaches have leached some juices. Let them cool slightly. Eat for pudding with cream or by themselves for breakfast.

P.S. Why are peaches and cream so delicious? I find it a deeply underrated combination compared to strawberries and cream. The acid in strawberries can sometimes fight the cream whereas with peaches and cream, the creaminess of the fruit both in flavour and texture seems to merge with the cream in the bowl. I wrote this about peaches for The Financial Times a couple of years ago. One of the things that stayed with me was the brilliant Harold McGee’s observation that peaches are rich in creamy aromas called ‘lactones’: ‘serve peaches with cream and you double down on lactonic richness’.

P.P.S Here are a couple of things that children have written about peaches in a TastEd lesson (TastEd is the food education charity I co-founded with head teacher Jason O’Rourke).