This simple, summer fruit tart is made with a no-bake ricotta cheesecake filling and topped with honey roasted apricots and spiced pistachios.

‘Tis the season for buying all of the fresh summer produce and piling them into buttery-crusts! Summer is my very favorite baking season because fruit and veggies are in abundance and they really don’t need much coaxing to shine in easy-peasy desserts. This roasted apricot and ricotta tart is a beautiful way to showcase those little golden gems, it’s endlessly adaptable and it will be on repeat in our house this summer.

short crust pastry for tarts

The base of this tart, and really any fruit tart, is a simple short crust pastry. There are three main types of pastry: pâte brissée, pâte sucrée, and pâte sablée. Pâte brissée is your basic pie crust that can be used in sweet or savory applications. The word brisée in French means broken, which makes sense due to the flaky, delicate layers in traditional pie crust. Pâte sucrée is a sweeter crust, traditionally used in tarts. The process is similar to brisée in that butter is worked into dry ingredients, but usually includes the addition of an egg yolk, which shortens the gluten strands in the crust and gives a crumblier, more moist texture. Finally, pâte sablée, or sandy crust, is a more cookie-like crust made with more sugar than the other two and uses the creaming method for mixing. For this tart, and most of our other fruit tarts, we are using a basic pâte sucrée for the base.

I incorporated a bit of spelt flour because I love to play with alternative flours, but you can certainly make this crust using 100% all purpose flour. You could also substitute the spelt flour for an equal amount (by weight) of rye flour or even semolina flour. When experimenting with incorporating alternative flours, I always start at 25% of the total flour weight.

a no-bake ricotta cream filling

The filling for this tart is reminiscent of a cheesecake filling—tangy and lightly sweetened. It’s made by simply creaming together whole-milk ricotta cheese and softened cream cheese until smooth, and then adding a bit of powdered sugar, heavy cream, vanilla, and lemon zest. Everything is beaten until very smooth and then poured into the baked crust and allowed to set for at least 4 hours. If you’d like to swap out the ricotta, mascarpone would be a great substitution.

how to make an apricot tart

Apricots are such fun fruits and they are only available for a short window of time so I really wanted them to shine in this tart. Roasting fruit allows helps to gently caramelize them, pulling out and highlighting all of the residual sweetness. Since apricots can be a bit on the tart side, roasting helps the sharpness to mellow out a bit. Pitted apricots are tossed in honey and lemon juice and then allowed to roast in a 350° F oven for 20-30 minutes, until soft and bubbling.

To make the tart, we start with a simple shortcrust pastry. Flour, sugar, and salt are blitzed with cold butter in a food processor, then an egg yolk and a bit of water is added until a dough begins to come together. The dough is pressed together, wrapped, and chilled, before being rolled out and baked in a tart pan.

While the tart shell is cooling, the ricotta filling is whipped together and then poured into the tart shell. Roasted apricots are piled on top and the whole thing heads to the refrigerator for a long chill. Before serving, the tart is sprinkled with spiced pistachios.