Last week I made another fruit tart, because I love them so much. I used the same recipe I always use for the crust and pastry cream.
Tart Crust
1 cup flour
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened
You just mix the three ingredients together and press the dough into a 9-inch tart pan.
And then after 10 minutes in the oven at 400F, it’s done. It looks slightly brown, but it doesn’t taste like it’s burnt.
Then comes the pastry cream, the recipe for which is here.
Pastry Cream
2 cups milk
1/4 cup sugar
2 egg yolks
1 egg
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Stir together the milk and 1/4 cup of sugar in a saucepan until it comes to a boil. Put the egg yolks, egg, cornstarch, and 1/3 cup sugar into a bowl, and whisk them together. Pour the boiling milk in a thin stream over the egg mixture, while you’re continuously stirring, so that the eggs don’t turn into scrambled eggs. Then after that’s all mixed together, return the mixture to the saucepan, and bring to a boil while constantly stirring. The bottom can burn if you’re not stirring enough, so be careful. Once it comes to a boil, take it off the heat, and put in the butter and vanilla extract. Once those are stirred in, you can stick it in the fridge (with some plastic wrap over the surface so it doesn’t form a skin) for a few hours until it’s cool.
I put the pastry cream into the tart shell. I just happened to have a small bit left over, so I had no choice but to eat it. I wouldn’t want it to go to waste now…
Usually, I arrange some fruit on top in a circular pattern radiating from the middle, because… well, I don’t know, that’s just how I thought fruit tarts should look. This time, though, for some reason I decided to slice all my fruit into circular shapes. I was imagining sort of a bubble theme to it.
I only used strawberries and kiwi. I think the circles were too big relative to the tart, so they didn’t really end up looking like bubbles. It looked kind of like some weird flower you’d find in the rainforest, or something.
Having a bunch of circular pieces that were supposed to look like bubbles made me layer them more than usual, so I ended up with more fruit on the tart than usual, which was good.