White Peach Tarte Tatin with Rose Champagne & Raspberry Gelee

I was down to the last of the luscious Shimizu white peaches that my parents had kindly passed to me, the very generous gift of a close Japanese family friend who was visiting. Amongst the many peach cultivars grown in Okayama prefecture, the Shimizu is the most sought after for its ambrosial sweetness - each bite into its yieldingly succulent flesh floods the mouth with a divinely perfumed nectar, a scent so haunting that all you can think of is the passing of its all-too-brief season (the best specimens are picked late July-early August), and all you can do is eagerly anticipate the next. I stared long and hard at the remaining two of my stash (the rest having been voraciously scarfed next to the sink, sticky juices trickling down and licked off arm), wondering how I could best stretch them to feed company for dessert. Blushed the tenderest dusty pink and covered with a fuzz that feels like the finest Hungarian goosedown, the precious peaches are presented individually wrapped in tissue-soft paper and swaddled by cushioned netting, a coddled appearance that befits their coddled existence - to ripen the prized peaches to perfection before harvest, each and every fruit on the tree grows under the protective swathe of its very own bag.

I then stared long and hard at my cookbooks, before finally deciding on a tarte Tatin recipe from Claudia Fleming's The Last Course. I must confess that I find inverting a tarte Tatin (or tartes Tatin, in this case, given that each peach half makes for an individual tarte) tremendously exciting. It's the moment of truth - Will it satisfyingly slide out with a resounding plop, resplendent in its caramel-glossed glory as you beam with triumphant pride (and breathe a sigh of relief)? Or is it stubbornly stuck, a taunting burnt sugar catastrophe as you burst into tears contemplating your ruinous course of action? Call it living dangerously (well, I did have store-bought ice-cream in the freezer as a back-up dessert plan, just in case...), but if the kitchen gods are smiling, and more importantly, you've correctly gauged the juiciness/ripeness of the fruit - be it apples, peaches, or otherwise - in question and adapted the degree of caramelization and cooking/baking times accordingly, the gratification of unmolding a just-right tarte renversee is unsurpassed. In this particular instance, I needn't have fretted - the fruit was so juicy the caramel never stood a chance of overcooking. The peaches emerged burnished yet tender, candied from the syrupy, buttery and deeply flavoured self-made sauce. And thanks to the upside-down order of things, the puff pastry lid-turned-base, still crisp and delectably flaky. To accompany, an elegant rose champagne gelee also adapted from Fleming's book - I used raspberries instead of the white peaches called for to flavour the bubbly (not having enough peaches to stretch that far, and having always liked the combination of peaches and raspberries) - and a dribble of raspberry coulis. No need to bust out a Billecart-Salmon vintaged rose for this; a Moet & Chandon Brut Imperial Rose, which I happened to have at hand, or some such like, will do very nicely here.