Tarts seem to be becoming a theme around here–must be the season. This week’s iteration of “probably a bit too ambitious for my skill level but I’m going to try it anyway” is a fresh fruit tart. A few years ago I ordered an enormous fresh fruit tart for a birthday cake from a swanky local baker’s, and I’ve been meaning to try doing one myself ever since. A friend of mine is planning a lunch party a couple of weeks hence and has asked me to provide the dessert, so I thought it a perfect time to try it; this is my practice run, because I’ve never made pastry cream before.
I couldn’t find a full recipe that had everything I was looking for, so I cobbled this together from a Martha Stewart recipe (the pastry) and the America’s Test Kitchen version (the pastry cream). Because this is my practice round, I went for the easy way out on the fruit–just raspberries and blackberries. Next time I’ll go for the fresh kiwi and mandarin orange slices and the works, but this time I just wanted to make sure I could cope with the tempering eggs part of the recipe. I managed to curdle the eggs in such a maneuver once before, and the fear has dogged me ever since.
Similar to the lemon meringue pie, this is one of those recipes done in stages–everything has to be chilled between assembly steps. This experience was less intense than the lemon meringue, though–the only part that requires careful attention is the pastry cream.
The first step is the crust. The birthday fruit tart of memory had a dense, thick crust, so instead of using the ATK recipe I went with Martha Stewart’s pate sucree (I can rarely bear to watch Martha Stewart on television, but she does have some good recipes.)
I am eternally grateful for our Cuisinart. It’s about twenty-five years old, and I hope it never dies–I don’t think I’d have the patience to make pastry crust or shortbread without it. One day I will be organized enough to spend a morning making several batches of sweet and savoury pastry crusts so that I can just pull them out of the freezer…one day. When I’ve made up my mind which specific recipes I like best. The pastry crust was mixed, shaped into a ball, chilled for two hours, rolled out, shaped, and went into the oven. I wanted a relatively thick crust, so I rolled the circle out to about half an inch, and lined the inside edge with the excess dough, which turned out to be unnecessary. The dough was deceptively soft when raw, even when chilled, and I feared it was going to come out puffy and soft. It didn’t; it was firm without being claggy and overwhelming, but the next time I do this I’ll roll it out a little bit more, to leave more room for pastry cream.
After baking, the crust went back into the refrigerator to chill, and I started on the pastry cream. I used the ATK recipe, but halved it as it looked like it would produce a lot more than what I needed; this recipe from The Joy of Cooking is close to what I did. (And as a bonus you can add the liqueur of your choice! Something that did not occur to me until I tasted the final result.)
Making the pastry cream was less fearsome than I expected, and I managed not to curdle the eggs (hurrah!). I added some almond flavouring, as I thought it would go nicely with the raspberries; next time, I’ll use amaretto rather than artificial flavouring. Once complete, it went back in the refrigerator–the instructions required a very specific three hours for this, although I’m sure if you poured it in a shallow pan it would take less time, even for a full recipe.
While the pastry cream was chilling, I added another tweak from the birthday tart of fond memory–I heated about 2/3 of a cup of chocolate chips and painted the inside of the cold shell with melted chocolate. Aside from being delicious, this seems to prevent the softening of the crust by the pastry cream and juice from the topping.
Finally all the elements were cooked and properly chilled. Assembly was easy, particularly as I wasn’t concerned on this occasion with layering everything in a nice pattern, as I will next time. Even with only half the recipe, I had more pastry cream than I could use, so next time the dough will definitely be rolled more thinly. I meant to use apricot jam to make the glaze (half a cup of jam + 1-2 tablespoons boiling water, mixed until the jam thins out), but discovered the jar I’d squirreled away mysteriously absent, so I used seville orange marmalade instead.
I was concerned that the orange marmalade would be too strong a flavour and overwhelm the berries. If I’d used a different combination of fruit, I think I would have been right; with the blackberries, however, it tasted a lot like I’d added sherry to the mix, an effect I was quite pleased with. I also like the effect of the little shreds of orange peel on the finished product. I think in the future I will stick with the apricot jam, though; the marmalade glaze was still quite thick and made it difficult to cover all the fruit. All that said, I’m quite pleased with the result, and look forward to trying a grander version for company.
