Few things are as sweet as our belle, Brooke Parkhurst, unless of course, you've tasted her fruit galettes. These single-crust pies inspired by rustic French cooking make easy, last-minute desserts that frame spring's most flavorful fruits.

Plum Pine Nut Galette

Whole wheat pastry dough
1/3 cup pine nuts
4 (almost 1 ½ lbs.) purple or red plums**
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
Parchment paper (can be the inside of a grocery store brown bag!)

**I like to use both purple and red plums, ripe and firm. Most recipes call for firm fruit but I like to mix it up with the different textures and variant sweetness of ripe and underripe fruit

Preheat oven to 375°. Toast 2 tbsp. pine nuts on a baking sheet in oven until nuts are lightly colored and fragrant. Allow baking sheet to cool, flip it over, cover with parchment paper.

Roll out whole wheat pastry dough on a lightly floured work surface into a 12-inch round (you want your dough to be about 1/8-inch thick). Move dough to parchment-covered baking sheet.

Half, pit and cut each plum lengthwise into 12 slender wedges. In a food processor, pulse together brown sugar and the remainder of pine nuts until the mixture is nicely incorporated, nuts are finely ground.

Cover 12-inch dough round with all but 2-3 tbsp. of sugar/nut mixture, making sure to leave a 2-inch border. Place plums over mixture (messy = rustic = en vogue & delicious) and fashion edges of dough over outer rim of plums. Scatter the 2 tbsp. toasted pine nuts over the plums along with the remainder of the sugar/nut mixture.

Bake galette for 35-40 minutes, the first 15 minutes with a tent of tin foil, the remaining time uncovered. Place galette and baking sheet on a rack to cool; allow galette 30 minutes before transferring to another platter.

Garnish galette with a dollop of low-fat sour cream. The tang of the dairy is a lovely complement to the nutty sweetness of the whole wheat crust and plums. Serve warm or at room temperature and watch the faces of your friends light up and ask for seconds!

Whole Wheat Pastry Dough

This dough is (excuse the pun) easy as pie--five minutes tops! There is no reason to buy a pre-made piecrust filled with flavor enhancers, chemicals, stabilizers and bad ingredients. Treat your body well and spend a few minutes getting your hands dirty.

1 ¼ cup whole wheat flour (preferably 100 percent organic)
3/4th stick (6 tbsp.) chilled, unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch cubes
2 tbsp. cold shortening (trans-fat free)
¼ tsp. salt
3-4 tbsp. ice water

With a pastry cutter or your hands, blend together in a large bowl whole wheat flour, butter, shortening and salt. Mixture should not be uniform, but should instead look like coarse meal with a few small lumps. Add 3 tbsp. ice water to the bowl and mix with a fork or your hands until the liquid is incorporated nicely into the mix.

Dough should hold together. If not, add a touch more water, one tsp. at a time. Place dough on a lightly floured work surface and knead mixture several times, being careful not to overwork. Crust will be tough if handled/kneaded too much! Form dough into a ball and then press flat into a small disk. Wrap well in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

Strawberry Galette

16 oz. (1 box) strawberries, washed and dried
2 tbsp. confectioner's sugar
2 tbsp. lemon juice
Half package of frozen puff pastry
1 tbsp strawberry jam

Preheat oven to 375°. Butter your baking sheet. Slice strawberries ½-inch thick (approximately 4 slices per strawberry) and toss with confectioner's sugar and lemon juice. Strawberries will macerate (sit in their lovely juices) while you work with the puff pastry.

On a lightly floured work surface, unfold puff pastry and cut in half. Reserve the remaining half for a future recipe. Roll dough into a rectangle, 12-inches long. If the sides lose their nice, uniform edge while rolling, trim them with a sharp knife. Transfer pastry to your buttered baking sheet.

Arrange strawberries on puff pastry. I like to do precise lines of the berries, six across. Leave at least a ½-inch border of pastry. Crimp edges to your liking.

Bake galette for 35 minutes. Place baking sheet on a rack to cool. While galette is cooling, heat one tbsp. strawberry jam. Once the jam is heated and thinned, lightly brush the berries with the preserves.

Elegant, easy! Enjoy immediately or at room temperature, if you can wait that long!