my adventures in baking

Saturday, July 7, 2012

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...

My 366 Photo Project: Everything June

Here is the summary of my June 2012 photos.

This month's theme was the makeover of our front garden.

Bye for now...

My 366 Photo Project: weeks 23, 24, 25 & 26

As evidenced by my lack of posting lately, I've been struggling to keep up with my daily/weekly posting of photos and just blogging in general. For my 366 Photo Project, it's been much harder than I expected to find interesting daily photos and then with just general life stuff getting in the way, it's been hard to keep up with weekly 'Snap Thursday' posting. I'm super impressed that my husband is still going strong and taking a photo and posting it every day on his 365 blog. I don't think he's missed a day yet! So anyway, we bought a house in May and moved (again!) so that was, of course, a busy and stressful process and my blogging fell by the wayside. But we are all settled in now so I'm planning to blog again regularly. I've got about 5 posts to do this weekend and hopefully this will get me back on track.

I'll still plan to post weekly for my 366 Photo Project (I'm half way through and feel like I have to finish out the year), but am going to bow out of the Snap Thursday group since I don't think that anyone else in the group is actually still posting. My theme for June is documenting the makeover of our new front garden. Exciting! My husband and I love to garden and felt that the one negative about our new house is the smaller lot size. However, we realized that our smaller backyard will mean much less time spent on maintenance and much more time enjoying the fruits of our labors. Plus, we still had a great raised front yard that was crying out for a makeover, so that would give us something to do.

When we started gardening at our first house (about ten years ago) we went about the whole thing very haphazardly - we just picked plants we liked and stuck them in the ground. This made it easy and fun to get started, but a few years later we realized there wasn't any flow to the garden in terms of theme, color, bloom time, or even plants in the right location for sun/shade. Luckily, plants are easily moved!

For our new garden, however, I wanted to get it (mostly) right from the start. During the six months we spent selling our condo and then living in a temporary apartment, I read up on garden design and native New England flowers and plants (gotta bring in those butterflies, bees and birds). Then, when we found our house, I started planning out the actual space with the flowers we wanted to include and figuring out how many of each we'd need. We decided to go with the color scheme of whites, yellows and purples and I wanted a cottage garden feel to it - full, lush, a bit wild-looking and lots of flowering plants. So far, so good. We've had a good amount of rain over the past month since we first planted everything, and with the exception on one dead lavender plant, everything else has grown in really well so far. I can't wait to see how it fills in next year!

I'll write another gardening post on all of the flowers we planted later. I'll include both the Latin and common names and a photo for each type of plant. We got all of the plants at our local Mahoney's Garden Center (we love spending the morning strolling through the garden center...fun!). I used to order plants through a catalog/online but when I compared the prices, Mahoney's was actually the same - or cheaper - for a larger sized plant. Sold!

See previous weeks from my 366 Photo Project here:
one & two, three, four, five, six, seven & eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two

June 1: after a full day of weeding, the front garden has been cleaned up.
We'll plan to take out the overgrown bushes next year.

June 2: we planted everything over two weekends.
Some of our plants from the first weekend: gaura (whirling butterflies) on the right
and rudbeckia (black-eyed Susan) on the left

June 3: (l-r) hakonechloa (Japanese fountain grass), rudbeckia, gaura

June 4: lavender and a couple of types of leucanthemum (daisies) are added

June 5: in this small side patch there are flowers to mirror what is in the main plot

June 6: small plot planted!

June 7: back to the main plot. There is a clematis vine we'll train up the railing (right) and a bleeding heart (left).

June 8: after getting everything in the ground I thought it still felt too empty and needed more plants to fill in
some of the holes.

June 9: it actually didn't take too long to get everything in the ground. It was fun to be digging in the dirt again.

June 10: some tall daisies, as well as a ghost fern, went in the back and a peony and lavender are closer to the front

June 11: we also were happy to put our bird-feeder back out

June 12: hungry hungry birds. They go through a full feeder per day!
We were hoping for cardinals but only got sparrows.

June 13: the next bunch of pictures are from the next weekend when we went back to the garden center
and picked out some additional flowers to fill in some of the gaps. This is one of my all-time favorite
flowers, geranium Rozanne. It flowers from spring until late fall and does really well in the high heat and humidity.