{TWD} Quick Classic Berry Tart

I am always excited to see one of Dorie Greenspan's tarts come up in the recipe rotation for the Tuesdays With Dorie baking group. So far, Dorie has batted 1.000 on her tart recipes. And if I can use the early local strawberries from my farm box, then so much the better! This week's Quick Classic Berry Tart was a perfect choice for this week.

n.o.e.'s notes:

- The tart recipe was chosen by Cristine of Cooking with Cristine. You can find the recipe on her site or on page 377 of Dorie Greenspan's book, Baking: From My Home to Yours.

- Dorie calls this tart "Quick" - right there in the recipe's title. While it's not exactly difficult I wouldn't be tempted categorize it as a fast recipe. The tart consists of a shortbread-like crust, pastry cream filling, fresh fruit and a jelly glaze. For best results, the tart is assembled at the last minute.

- I've always loved Dorie's tart crust. I chose to make the version with nuts, using almond meal to replace 1/4 cup of the recipe's flour. Dorie gives quite detailed instructions for making the crust; the key elements being: freezing the butter before mixing it with the dry ingredients in the food processor, processing the ingredients long enough for the dough to form into "clumps and curds", and freezing the formed tart shell before baking. Nothing too tricky, but a bit time consuming. If you have the foresight to keep an extra tart shell in your freezer (actually a great idea) then this recipe might qualify as quick-ish, but there's still the matter of making pastry cream.

- Pastry cream is a cousin to custard, in that you are using egg yolks (and cornstarch in the case of pastry cream) to thicken a liquid mixture over heat on the stove top. We've made it for other TWD desserts, so I while I wasn't particularly worried I did want to make some changes. In the past my pastry cream has been passable although you could say it puts the "paste" in past-ry cream. It always thickens immediately without giving the cornstarch a chance to cook. I decided to try for a thinner consistency this time around, so I reduced the cornstarch and made sure that my egg yolks were not super-large (I used 99 g of yolk total for a full recipe of pastry cream) The cream was a lot more manageable this time; it cooked for a while before I deemed it thick enough. In retrospect, I probably should have left it on the flame for just a little while longer.

- I piled the pastry cream high in the tart shell, disregarding Dorie's directions to fill to below the rim of the shell.

- The fruit topping was no more difficult than washing the berries (and slicing in the case of the strawberries). When I assembled the tart, I arranged the different berries in stripes so each person could cut a piece with a favorite type of berry.

- The tart's final element is a glaze made from red currant jelly boiled with a bit of water. I surveyed my jam collection two or three times without locating the currant jelly I was sure I owned, before using the apple jelly that was in my fridge. Dorie gives the option of dotting each piece of fruit with a drop of glaze, or brushing the glaze over the entire surface of the fruit. I painted my glaze with a pastry brush, and had a ton of glaze left over. A tablespoon or two of jelly with a few drops of water would have been sufficient.

- I brought the tart to book group last Thursday. The combination of the slightly thin pastry cream and the overfilled nature of the tart shell made the tart very difficult to transport. I wouldn't use the word "sloshed" but every time the car turned a corner, there was a wave-like effect in the pastry cream, and some spilled over the sides. Luckily I had taken pictures before it left my kitchen.



the verdict:

The book group members devoured the tart, and while I agreed that it was delicious, I was distracted by my disappointment at how poorly the tart had survived its 5 mile car trip, and by my nagging worries that the pastry cream was too thin. In truth, those things did not matter; the tart was quite good.

In fact, thanks to my husband I now know that I can bake as authentic a French fruit tart as a French restaurant in town. It turns out that on the day I served this tart at book group he had eaten a business lunch at a lovely French restaurant and had ordered fruit tart for dessert. He told me that mine was pretty much equal in taste.