Avid Baker's Challenge: Classic Fruit Tart

This month's Avid Baker's Challenge recipe is the Classic Fruit Tart on page 366 of The Weekend Baker by Abby Dodge. With buying our house and moving, I've missed the past two months (scones and braided brioche) so was really looking forward to getting back in the club this month but, sadly, I was not very impressed with the recipe. I guess I picked the wrong month to jump back in!

My main issue is that the pâte sucrée crust was really difficult to work with, impossible to roll out and crumbled into pieces when I tried to move it from the cooling rack to the serving platter. I was extremely disappointed - especially since I was making it for our 4th of July party! The pastry cream was okay - nothing very different from when I've made it before - but with the difficulties with the crust I'd have to give this month's recipe two thumbs down. If this was the first tart crust I'd ever made, I definitely would have thought it was me and would be soured on ever trying it again. It was that bad. Luckily I have a lot of experience - and love of - making pie/tart crusts so I know it was just a flukey recipe.

I had doubled the recipe so I could make two 7-inch tarts and two 3-inch tarts...but that didn't work out so well. The only ones that were salvageable were the small tarts, so I guess all was not lost. Here are my small tarts and step-by-step is below.

my two surviving tartlets

mise en place for the pâte sucrée

cutting the butter into the dry ingredients

the butter is incorporated then the egg gets added

at this point the dough was still very dry and not coming together in the bowl.
I dumped it onto the counter to knead it together.

done! At this point I had no idea of the difficulties that lay ahead...

into the fridge to chill out and rest the gluten

it was a nightmare getting the dough into my tart rings, but I finally did it...
the ugliest crust I've ever made. Boo.

trying to move the first large crust to the serving plate...ruined!

and here's what happened with the second large crust, a bigger disaster.
I ended up serving the pieces as a sort of a 'make your own' trifle bar at our July 4th party.

mise en place for the custard for the pastry cream

I like to make custard by beating the eggs, sugar and flour in the standing mixer...

until it gets to ribbon stage...

and then pouring in the hot milk.

then it goes back into the saucepan and onto the stove and whisk, whisk, whisk like crazy as it is heated to a boil

then simmer for 1-2 minutes and press through a sieve to get out any lumps

the strained custard is covered with plastic wrap and goes into the refrigerator to chill

my berries - delicious! Sadly, I didn't end up being able to use them all after my large crusts shattered...

whipped cream to lighten up the custard

voila, the finished pastry cream

building the tartlet

with fruit on top

yum

Bye for now...

Heavenly Cake Baker: Tiramisù (free choice)

It's free choice this week in the Heavenly Cake Baker club. I was debating between the Red Velvet Cake on page 83 of Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes and Tiramisù on page 267. Tiramisù won out in the end as it seemed like more of a challenge.

I must confess that I cheated a bit this week and deviated from the recipe in the book to (mostly) follow a recipe I'd made once before. While baking, I went back and forth between the two but the final cake, in the end, leaned more toward the more familiar recipe and not the book. I hope I won't be kicked out of the club!

To start with, I got totally flummoxed when reading RLB's instructions for the ladyfingers because she instructs you to pipe the fingers but also to pipe out an 8" disk...but the disk is never called for in the tiramisù recipe. It wasn't until much, much later that I realized the disk instructions were for the recipe on the previous pages. D'oh!

The recipe I (mostly) used called for ladyfingers for the top and bottom layers and a sponge cake as the middle layer (another reason I kept wondering where to incorporate the ladyfinger disk). As you can see from the pictures below, my ladyfingers were pretty much a disaster. Next time I will definitely either use RLB's ladyfinger recipe or the sponge cake recipe (which said it could also be used to pipe the ladyfingers).

I'm not sure exactly what went wrong with my ladyfingers. I think I may have over-beaten my eggs, egg yolks and sugar mixture, but everything seemed fine until just before I started filling the pastry bags...then the batter just collapsed before my eyes. Sad.

mise en place for the ladyfingers

beating the eggs and sugar

I can tell disaster is coming; after adding the flour and butter, the batter is already collapsing

as you can see I had a hard time getting a light dusting of powdered sugar!
the first set wasn't great but they weren't too horribly bad

the second set was a complete disaster

they look okay from afar and were actually very light inside...but

...they were so sad and FLAT up close

The sponge cake, on the other hand, was fantastic. It was easy to pull together, it didn't collapse on me and it baked in less than 10 minutes. It was spongy and moist (it would roll up nicely for a roulade!). It was a bit sticky on the top, but otherwise was very easy to work with after it was baked. I picked it up, flipped it over - both dry and wet - and it never tore.

mise en place for the sponge cake

egg whites and sugar are whipped to a stiff peak

gorgeous!

dry ingredients are added to the egg yolk, sugar, vanilla and water mixture

after the whipped egg whites are folded in, it's baked in a sheet pan

less than 10 minutes later - done!

mise en place for the pastry cream

making the pastry cream...whisk whisk whisk until it boils

the mascarpone has been added to the pastry cream which is set over an ice bath to cool

the final ingredients: cream to lighten the pastry cream; super strong coffee and Kahlua to soak the layers;
and cocoa/powdered sugar to decorate

adding the whipped cream to the mascarpone pastry cream

almost incorporated - smells delicious!

the first layer of cookies are soaked with the coffee/Kahlua and
covered with the mascarpone pastry cream

the sponge cake layer is up next; it's given a good soaking

I had lots of extra cookies and more sponge cake than I needed for the large serving dish I was using so I made a second dish (what I'm going to do with TWO dishes of tiramisù though, I don't know). However, at this point I started thinking that I was going to run out of the cream filling by the time I got to the top so I whipped up some more heavy cream, added a few splashes of the coffee/Kahlua mixture for a bit of flavor and then incorporated it back into the mascarpone pastry cream mixture. It diluted the delicious pastry cream flavor a little, but definitely made it go further.

the final layer is made up of ladyfingers and then topped with more cream

all done...looks great

now I just need 20 people to serve this to!

after setting up for about an hour, I sliced into it; I think it will be even better tomorrow after the
flavors have more time to meld

delicious!

Bye for now...