its 2009!

We ate a lot of animals towards the end of the year(you’ll see them at the end of the post) and here’s a tart I spent 3 hours making. I wasn’t surprised then to realize the last time I made this tart was in medical school. Its been that long!

It was a lot of effort but worthwhile because it was so well received. I think the best part of the tart was the pate brisee(flaky pastry) tart shell. I love Sherry Yard’s Desserts by the Yard, so far the baklava, out of these world brownies and this tart shell were excellent.

The creme patissiere was from Gordon Ramsay’s Just Desserts which is one of my other favourite cookbooks. The hazlenut shortbread, orange and lemon pudding were from this book. I chose his recipe among all the recipes I had for creme patissiere because it used the least amount of egg yolks, I didn’t want to have a couple of egg whites left to handle. You know how meringues and me aren’t friends!

The pastry was lopsided as it was my very first time at blind baking (ie putting rice/beans in the tasrt shell to weigh it down and encourage it to bake evenly). I think I struggled too much trying to remove the rice in the shells and the piece of parchment stuck to the dough that the dough cooled down significantly before being returned into the oven. This resulted in serious warping and uneven baking!!

The good thing about ugly tart bases is that you can hide it with a filling!

I like the speckling of vanilla seeds and the bright yellow of the cream filling, made extra yellow by the butter stirred in at the end, a little trick to enrich the creme and give it a delicious melt in your mouth texture without that flourry custardy taste.

This looks so cheerful, don’t you think?

Apricots, blueberries and strawberries

The second smaller tart looked a little more bare as I ran out of fruit.

The leftover dough and filling in individual tartlets

Now for all the roasts.. That huge Christmas Turkey we had!

Roast lamb we had yesterday at Mummy and Daddy’s. Our aunties are really good with roasts, personally I’ve never ever cooked a roast, they scare me. I’m afriad of it turning bone dry, I’m always amazed how they create flavourful, bursting at the skins juicy pieces of meat.

Roast chicken, crispy skin and juicy insides. We had the usual sides of greens and salad

Roast potatoes lightly seasoned with salt and roasted together with the meat.

The tart was dessert shared with everyone and it was a great meal, hope you had a great start to the new year and be blessed with good food and love in 2009!

I will post the recipe for the crispy tart shell, it was so crisp and stayed crisp overnight in the fridge, we had some for breakfast.. I will also post on the different type of doughs for tart shells that result in different qualities of shells. Pate brisee for a flaky and crispy shell, pate sucree for a crumblier but still crisp and sweet shell and pate sable which is a “sandy” textured tart shell. Mastering the shell can lead to infinite possibilities including savoury quiches and meat pies, fruit pies, egg tarts, crumble pies, cream pies, custard tarts, the list goes on. The only thing is compared to say a mix and bake cake or brownie, pies take time because there are a couple of steps in making it, from assembling the crust to making the filling then assembling the whole thing.