Custard Tarts with Pomegranates

I had some left over pate sucre, and this was meant to enable me to use some utterly gorgeous concord grapes, but needless to say I screwed up. So I decided to make simple custard tarts with some fresh pomegranate seeds as decoration. The custard was flavored with a marzipan liquor we bought in Germany, these worked alright, although they are a tad ugly. 

Mini Mix Tarts Cranberry, Raspberry, Pear, Ginger and Clove

I had a lot of cranberries left over from the bundt cake and so I decided to make a small tart using them and some pears that had lingered a tad too long in our kitchen. I also had a smidge left of the pate sucre, so I simply rolled it out, popped it in small tart pans, and baked them until golden brown. 

The filling was stewed pears, cranberries, raspberries, a little bit of finely chopped ginger, a splash of pear liquor, some cloves, a bunch of sugar and a thyme sprig that was removed once I had finished simmering the filling. The consistency was like that of a jam, and so I added a little bit of corn starch to thicken it. I popped it into the ready shells, garnished with finely chopped ginger and a sprig of thyme. Easy as that. 

The tarts were well, tart but the combination of the sugary, buttery sucre meant that they weren't an unpleasant tart. I was quite pleased with these. 

Pear Almond Tart

I know it's such a cliche, but I do love the combo of pears and almonds, sweet and crunchy. Once again this tart was born from the farmers market excursion. There were pears there that I hadn't heard of the description read: 'Conference Pears: Pale yellow flesh tinged with pink. Tastes like the best canned pears when fresh'. Seriously how could I pass these up? My curiosity was piqued when I read tastes like the best canned pears. Now, I don't know about you, but to me a good canned pear is sweet, supple and a little firm. These were as they described, they smelled incredibly good. 

I made a simple pate sucre dough and then got the recipe for a pear almond tart from the March Gourmet magazine. I simple chopped up the pear into slim slices and baked them after I had baked the crust to a golden brown, right on top of the crust. Then I poured on the custard, baked that, then I added chopped roasted almonds, sugar and egg whites then popped it in the oven. 

Unfortunately, after I had cooled down the tart I placed it on a wooden chopping board that had at some time in it's past had onions cut on it. So to me the tart tasted very like pears and onion- not a great combo. However, other people did tell me it was good! 

Week 3: Tarts a mistake or two

I tried making three tarts on the weekend and succeeded in 1.5. I have issues with crust. In class we're using flan rings, aka tart rings. They have no base and are essentially what they sound like - a ring of metal that's about 2cm high . They have no base. This is why I have issues (or maybe it's why I'd like to think I have issues). I made a pate sucree - the sweet dough for well, sweet things. I made a pear tart with brown butter filling, and a walnut one with vanilla alcohol and molasses. 

In the oven the bases on both broke, so I managed to have a puddle of baked stuff on the outside of the flan ring rather than in it. This was a big deal with the pear tart, as it was basically islands of pears with very little surrounding them. On the other hand, the walnut one wasn't so bad, you couldn't really taste the punchy inside 'gravy' as it had all leaked out. Instead it was sort of like a giant walnut cookie, that ended up being pretty tasty. 

I asked my teacher what I'd done, and he suggested that I hadn't pulled the dough in enough on the edges of the base to create a 90 degree angle. This basically means that I had a really weak base and so it broke aka exploded. So I will try it again this week some time, probably with different filling and see how I fair. 

I do love tarts! Having better luck this week with rolling the dough. Pate sucree can be a bit of a bitch. Word. 

Week 2: Tarts

We have rotations - two weeks of tarts, two weeks of doughs, two weeks of cakes and two weeks of bread. In some unknown order and grouping. This week was tarts and next week will be the same. We've made pate sucree and pate brisee. Pate sucree is a sweet shortcrust sort of dough used for sweet things, and the pate brisee is a standard dough for savory things. 

The kitchen is really hot, I'm talking hot enough to melt the butter in pate sucree really quickly, so when we've come to rolling out the refridgerated dough we have some serious issues. Mostly it falls apart when it comes ready for us to line the flan tins (tart tins - the type without any bottom so the dough kind of falls right through). So this weekend I've decided to make some tarts using the scaled down doughs (we usually make batches of dough that make between 4-6 tarts). 

I made a onion quiche from Julia Childs amazing book "The French Chef" using the altered pate brisee recipe we use at school. I'm currently in the middle of making a pear tart with brown butter filling and slivered almonds, as well as a walnut caramel tart. 

We spent Friday morning tasting around twenty chocolates, all different quality, and with differing  amounts of cocoa matter and butter. We were told to describe each piece in terms of taste and texture. Which, I learned is surprisingly hard when usually all it takes is "good" or "bad". A nice sugar high for the morning. 

Still loving school.