Tarting Yourself Up - Raspberry Chantilly Tart

My dad uses the word "tart" perhaps more than your average person. He's renovating his house at present and talks about "tarting the place up" and says that the place is "tartsville, darling" in this amusingly mincing voice. Even when he buys a new suit or a tie or cufflinks he talks about "looking like a tart." He's quite the character, my dad.

 

For those who are playing along in America, the word "tart" has several meanings, including one which you may or may not be aware of -

 

First, there's the word for a sharp taste, e.g. "that apple was a bit tart for my liking,"

 

Secondly, there's the food - a baked dish with a pastry base and an open top.

 

And thirdly, there's the British slang for a promiscuous woman or a prostitute.

 

Obviously my dad's prolific use of the word "tart" pertains to the third definition. Not that he's a promiscuous woman or a prostitute (although I have no idea what he got up to in his younger years, but I really don't want to think about that!!!), but to "tart oneself up" is to put a bit of effort into making yourself... perhaps a step beyond presentable. Showy, even. And to have "a tart on the side" implies that you are engaging in, erm, extracurricular activities that perhaps you ought not be!

 

And obviously this post is about baked goods, not about women of questionable character or putting on a show. Although I have to admit the tarts did a pretty good job of being showy - they're quite simple, but also effective.

I also need to confess that, in the past, I've used a (baked!) tart as a vehicle for publicly delivering a backhanded comment about someone's moral sensibilities and personal choices. They say that if you can't say anything nice then don't say anything at all... unless you can backstab with sweetened baked goods, in which case you're good to go!
 

The recipe came from the book 50 Rainbow Tarts. It caught my eye in a book shop the other week while I was looking for a birthday gift for my friend A, and I simply had to have it. Hah, that's usually how it happens. Happy not-birthday to me! Although A was actually with me at the time, so there's really no excuse for losing focus...

 

It's a great concept, and it really appeals to me in terms of how visually pleasing and structured the recipes are - there are 50 tarts, all colours of the rainbow, and the index is basically a paint colour chart with little sample dots and the name of the tart  and page number listed below it (sorry about the quality of the picture - I snapped it quickly with my iPhone to show a friend who displays slight OCD tendencies when it comes to colour-coding!).

 

You can tell it was written by a graphic designer with a love of food, and I wish I'd thought of it first! Quick suggestion to the publishers for the second print run, though - run your dots right the way across the page and treat it as a full-page spread rather than two pages, or else do the same but starting in one corner and radiating out through the spectrum of colour and shade as you move across the page.

 

There are both sweet and savoury tarts, and each one has been made into a small oblong with a with a white strip at the bottom, much like a paint colour chip. I'd probably call it an open tart because everything is kind of piled on top of a flat base with no sides. There are four different pastry base recipes right in the front, several recipes for the white part, and from there the book makes its way through the rainbow by applying different toppings to various combinations of base and cream.

 

INGREDIENTS:

Pastry Base
160g plain flour
25g icing sugar
50g unsalted butter, chopped into small pieces
Pinch salt
1 vanilla bean (I used 1tsp of vanilla bean paste)
1 egg
3tbsp milk

Chantilly Cream
150mL chilled cream
20g icing sugar

The Tart
1 quantity pastry (above)
1 quantity cream (above)
125g raspberries, plus more for decoration (I used frozen raspberries and picked out 24 good ones plus a few spares and let them thaw out on a piece of paper towel, standing on their ends)
3/4tsp gelatine powder
 

METHOD:

Pastry Base
Line baking tray with baking paper. Combine all ingredients as far as the salt.

Add vanilla, egg and milk and roughly combine with your hands (although I prefer to use a butter knife, because then I don't get sticky hands. They will get sticky later, though, just not quite as sticky as this step!).

Lightly flour your hands, remove rings (I'm telling you to do that because I always forget!) and tip onto a floured bench and knead the dough until smooth and it forms a ball. You don't want it too sticky but also not too dry.

Roll out flat and cut into four 12cm x 15cm rectangles (I would probably make eight that were half the size next time). Note that in the process of squaring them up, I ended up with excess pastry. So I spread the offcuts with apricot jam, rolled them into little pinwheels and baked them with the rest of the pastry. Yum!

Place onto prepared tracy, prick all over with a fork and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 180oC (350oF). Bake for about 20mins, or until lightly golden. Cool.

Chantilly Cream
Beat cream in mixer until firm peaks form (but don't let it turn to butter!). Sift sugar into cream and beat for another few seconds until sugar is well incorporated.

The Tart
Combine the raspberries (except those set aside for decoration) with sugar and gelatine with a tablespoon of water in a saucepan over medium heat. Crush raspberries gently with a wooden spoon and bring to the boil. Remove from heat, strain through fine sieve to remove seeds, then cool completely (I put mine in the fridge to speed things up. Use a container with thin sides rather than a ceramic dish, as it will cool faster).

Once cooled, fold the raspberry liquid into half the cream, then spread on the upper part of the pastry base. Pipe or spread the remaining chantilly cream in whatever pattern your heart desires onto the lower part of the pastry. Decorate with the intact raspberries that you drained earlier.

THE WRAP-UP:

 

The base itself wasn't as sweet a shortcrust as I am accustomed to, which kind of bugged me when I tried eating it raw, but obviously once it is loaded up with chantilly cream that is no longer an issue ;) It's also worth mentioning that in my head, a sweet shortcrust pastry is the melts-in-your-mouth one mum used to make from the Alma Lach's The Hows and Whys of French Cooking, which, predictably, is quite a heavenly pastry. I will probably experiment with different shortcut pastry recipes, but if you do the same you should bear in mind that the pastry needs to be robust enough to hold up when it is loaded up with topping and moved around.

 

I tried several methods of piping the cream (I'm a piping kinda gal!) but I'm sure just smearing it on with a knife or the back of a spoon would do just as well. I think all three look fine, but the third one is probably a bit prettier.

 

Be warned that the cream becomes a little runny once you fold the raspberry mixture through. I don't know whether I didn't put enough gelatine in, or it didn't cool enough, or it was just always going to happen. I might have to give it another try, just to be sure, and maybe add a bit more gelatine. All in the name of quality control, you see... ;)

 

Alright then, you lot, off you go. Get yourselves a cup of tea and have a little bit of tart on the side...

"It's a Miracle!" Freeform Berry Tart

Kia ora!

Well it's been quite some time since I posted. I could give you a million reasons, but mostly it's just that I've been living life (and loving it!).

As I write this I'm on holidays with Kirsti visiting Kat in NZ . We've been bumming about Auckland with Kat for the last few days, and tomorrow we head off to find us some Hobbitses. We haven't yet decided if we will make it a habit to eat Second Breakfast in our travels but I guess we'll just have to take things as they come ;)

Speaking of breakfast, this recipe is one you could **almost** get away with for breakfast - I mean, if berry Danishes are breakfast food then surely so may this be. I made it for a friend the night before I flew out, so the lucky bugger had the option at any rate!

I made a half batch (or at least I **thought** I did - recipe as follows), but the full recipe can be found in Margaret Fulton's Baking (which Kirsti gave me last year for my birthday). True to form I only vaguely followed the instructions. You should all know by now that I'm pretty impatient and also tend towards laziness, interspersed with forgetfulness. And yet, it turned out just fine. Things usually do, when it involves butter and sugar, not to mention berries and cream. Can't really go wrong :)

HAHAHA oh man, I just re-read the recipe before copying it out, and realised just how poorly I halved it. So the recipe below is the complete one. I halved the flour and almonds in the first bracket (I can't say for sure whether I halved the butter. I may have, but make no promises), and everything in the second, and it's actually a bit of a miracle that it held shape at all, but hey, it tasted great!

INGREDIENTS:

2c plain flour

125g butter

1/2c ground almonds

2tbsp castor sugar

1 egg, lightly beaten

A little grated lemon rind

1tbsp rum

1/2c ground almonds

1/2c castor sugar

600g mixed berries (frozen is fine - thaw them first though, and if there is lots if juice/water, drain most of it off)

3tbsp icing sugar

Cream to serve. 

Have all ingredients at room temperature. Mix ingredients in the first bracket in the order in which they appear (I dumped them all in the food processor) until combined. Form into a ball, wrap in glad wrap and refrigerate for an hour. (I chucked it in the freezer for about half an hour. Impatience and all!)

Roll out on baking paper in a 30cm circle, put on a tray and chill for 30 minutes. (Seeing as I had halved the flour and almonds, my circle was a bit smaller, and I estimate that I smooshed it to around 5mm thick. With my hands. Yep, I was totally winging it.)

Preheat oven to 180oC. (Check!)

Sprinkle tart shell with the second lot of almond plus 1tbsp of the sugar. Spread fruit over shell, leaving 5cm border. Fold border up to hold fruit in, leaving a gap in the middle. Sprinkle remaining sugar on pastry. 

(Because I was transporting ingredients, I  combined the almonds and sugar in a freezer bag. Fortuitously there was a big lump of sugar in there to sprinkle on the pastry at the end, so I set that aside then sprinkled a thin layer of the combined mixture onto the tart shell, then dumped the berries into the bag, trapped some air in it as if you were crumbling/flouring meat and shook it around to coat the berries. I then spread that mixture on, folded the edges up and sprinkled on the sugar. More than one way to skin a cat!)

Bake on the lowest shelf for about 45 minutes, until the pastry is golden. Cool on tray until just warm (we know how impatient I am - I cooled it for around five minutes!), dust with icing sugar (I didn't), cut into slices and serve with cream. 

Dodgy iPhone photo (nicely styled cream, though!):

 

The half(ish) batch would have served four. 

Leftovers!

 

This is quite an easy recipe, and although it requires refrigeration steps, you can kind of work around that as you cook your main course. It's definitely one I'll make again. And because it's freeform, it doesn't matter a jot if it turns out "rustic" (or, to the average bystander, "ugly"). 

Enjoy!

Teacup Apple Crumble

So... is it me, or does anyone else suffer from the illusion that things that come in tiny servings must be healthy? Mini muffins. Fun-sized Mars Bars. Fun-sized anything. Mini Magnums. Doughnut centres. Aeroplane-sized cans of Coke. And that somehow, because it's in a tiny portion (and therefore uses more packaging - three cheers for environmental destruction!), you can eat more of them. Like two. For the purposes of this, let's say two. We don't need to dig deeper into my abysmal snacking habits here right now.

 

Now, I love apple crumble. I love apple crumble almost as much as I love deluding myself. So making apple crumbles in tiny portions seemed like the perfect idea. Sure, I could have made them in shot glasses like you see at cocktail parties, but come on, you need enough apple crumble for it to work its wonderful, warming magic on you.

 

INGREDIENTS:

 

3 apples

1tsp sugar

1tsp cinnamon

3 cloves

A little water

1tbsp butter

1tsp cinnamon

2tbsp brown sugar

3tbsp plain flour

 

(Note that I "wrote" the quantities into the My Fitness Pal app in grams (which was a rough conversion to begin with), and now I'm converting it back, so they may be a little out. Play with it until it feels (and tastes!) right!)

 

Peel and roughly dice apples. Cook them, covered, with a little water and the sugar and spices until softened - around 5 minutes. Make sure they don't stick. Once softened, tip off any extra water and leave cover off.

 

Meanwhile, rub butter, cinnamon, sugar and flour together until evenly distributed. Try not to "test" too much of it - rest assured that it really does taste quite nice!

 

Grease 3 (or 4, depending on their size) oven-proof teacups. Divide apple mixture among the teacups. Remove and discard cloves. Top with the crumble mixture.

 

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200oC for around 5-10 minutes, until lightly browned. Obviously I can't remember whether it was 5 or 10 minutes, and as you can see from the scorched bits hidden under the ice cream, I overshot the mark, so keep an eye on it! All you're doing is browning the topping as the filling should still be hot. At some stage in the near future I will make this again and test the times but for now, hey guys, it's apple crumble. It's not rocket science. It needs to be hot, and apple-y, and cinnamon-y, and wonderful. No biggie.

 

 

Enjoy one with a scoop of ice cream. Or two.

 

And for those health-conscious peops out there, there are 301 calories per serving without adding ice cream. So it's probably just as well you made these in a tea cup, otherwise you'd go back to the pan a sneak another spoonful. And then another... and another... and another... yeah, I'm onto you!

Mango and Peach Sorbet

You may recall that I got the ice cream maker attachment for my Kenwood for Christmas. The first thing I made with it was raspberry sorbet, and, having neither the time nor the inclination to faff about with making an egg-cream-custardy-thing to make proper ice cream out of, or to then do something with the egg whites, I decided to make sorbet again yesterday instead of branching out into the grown-up world of proper ice cream. After all, Melbourne is in the middle of ANOTHER week of 30oC+ and I ain't turning no stove nor no oven on for nobody!

 

Sorbet it is. Locate fruit, sugar, liquid of some sort and food processor. Whizz together. And this one's even better than the raspberry sorbet because this time there was no boiling of sugar syrup. Huzzah!

 

INGREDIENTS:

1 ripe mango, peeled, pitted, chopped

2 ripe peaches, peeled, pitted, chopped

1/4c lime juice (that's about the juice of 1.5 limes)

3 heaped tablespoons of icing sugar

 

Whizz it all up in the food processor until smooth. If it's not cool, which it will be if the fruit was in the fridge, chill it.

 

Jump into your Tardis, put the bowl of your ice cream maker in the freezer 24 hours ago (if that's the sort of unit you have, like I do), then come back to the present day and remove it from the freezer and set it up.

 

This is where I say "freeze according to ice cream maker manufacturers' instructions" but in my case, turn your Kenwood/other inferior machine on, pour the puree in and leave it going for half an hour to 45 minutes.

 

Once again I got quite a soft sorbet but I'm imagining that when I pull the leftovers out the freezer tonight I will discover that it is quite solid. (Note: they were. I had to leave them out for ages before I could get the spoon through!)

 

You can add more or less icing sugar to taste, but the amount there was just enough to balance the lime juice and let the mango shine. This was originally supposed to be all-mango but SOMEONE ate the other mango (and it wasn't me, y'all!). Nonetheless I think it was better this way - the peach made it not-terribly-mangoey but sort of supported the flavour without overpowering it. If that makes sense.

 

I can't say which is my favourite because I am inherently biased towards raspberry but it doesn't seem fair to choose the quality of a recipe on what my favourite flavour happens to be, so... if you want something tart and refreshing, possibly to accompany a chocolatey dessert (although it is damned fine on its own), go with the raspberry. If you want to lounge about eating sorbet on a summer's eve then go with the mango (and it has also occurred to me that I could just serve it in a glass and add a splosh (bigger than a splash) of rum to it, just for kicks).

Sweet Enough Already

Remember when you were a kid, and your mum tried to make you eat Weet-Bix or Rice Bubbles without any sugar on top, and you whinged and whined and squirmed because it wasn't sweet enough and it was borrrrrrrrrring, even if it had chopped banana on top? (or was that just me? I loved nothing better than sprinkling heaps of sugar on my Rice Bubbles so that it formed a bit of a sugary, crusty raft, adrift in a sea of milk... no prizes for guessing why I was porky!).

Well anyway, the point I wish to make is that, at some point in relatively recent history (the last 3-4 years), my tastebuds have changed quite dramatically. For starters, I eat olives now. Yep, I do. It's true. I used to hate them with a passion, but now - provided they're the good quality ones, of course - I will scoff them down with reckless abandon. And I will also quite happily chow down on a bowl of steamed vegies and a serving of lean protein, and feel the most odd sensation of... well, I don't quite know what it is. It could be my body responding well to a food that is not high in fats or sugars or things that it has to really battle to process. It could be that I enjoy the taste. Or it could also be a liberal serving of Smug.

Similarly, a couple of years ago I realised that Weet-Bix with a wee sprinkling of All-Bran, served with either chopped banana or a spoonful of sultanas, was actually quite naturally sweet. And something about it pleased me and made me very happy of a morning. Perhaps it was the feeling of virtue for having made a healthy start to my day. Perhaps it was that my blood sugar wasn't all over the place, or knowing that it would be a good few hours before the urge to snack reared its ugly head. Who knows. But at around the same time I began to recognise that the natural sweetness of fruits and spices is actually enough to balance the sourness of natural (in this case, home-made goat's milk) yoghurt.

And that's how I used my yoghurt. The first two serves were with grated apple, a few sultanas and a sprinkling of each of cinnamon and ground cloves. What can I say - I'm a sucker for the ol' apple-cinnamon-cloves combination. If I were on Death Row, I would want steaming hot apple crumble with a crunchy top as my final meal, served with a liberal helping of vanilla icecream. And while we're at it, also some double cream. Because Death Row calories don't count! Actually, it would be my final dessert of my final meal, because I would also need to eat corned beef one last time before passing into the Hereafter. With mashed potato, of course.

That wasn't weird at all, was it.

And this most recent serve included chopped apple (because I didn't feel like cleaning the grater again!), pear and banana, topped with my goat-ghurt and the aforementioned spices. The sweetness of the fruit was enough for me. I guess I really am all grown up!

Note - this was my Sunday breakfast in bed, as evidenced by the background, and took it as an afterthought using my new iPhone (squee!). And the book upon which my breakfast rests is 50 Shades of Grey. No, I didn't purchase it myself (I'm still wading through my pile of unread books as part of my 101 Things challenge so I'm not allowed to buy new books) but yes, I'm having a bit of trouble putting it down. I'm not sure exactly how I will go about reviewing it, considering the content is fairly graphic and involves SPOILER ALERT some fairly k!inky stuff (the ! is so this site isn't blocked by your workplace's firewall!), but it's... I dunno, a little bit Twilight, in that it's not that well written but if you accept it for what it is then it's not so bad. Let's just say that it may surprise you!

Returning from that segue, you should definitely try grated apple and sultanas with natural yoghurt and a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg on top. I first tried it in a hostel in Austria, and initially I was horrified by the fact I had apparently inadvertently served myself a whopping bowl of unsweetened natural yoghurt, but then my tongue acclimatised and registered the apple juice and all was well in the world :)