Two of my favourite blogs are Tartlette and Cannelle et Vanille. I believe both authors have French backgrounds and both seem to have a penchant for tarts. So it’s little surprise that when I had an excess of strawberries, and a ball of leftover pastry that I scoured these blogs for inspiration. What I ended up making took ideas from both ladies and mixed them up with some of my own.
I didn’t quite achieve the effect I was anticipating. I think next time I would actually bake the custard in the pie crust until slightly firm and then add the strawberries. I was hoping the strawberries would stay on top of the custard and I think this would achieve that effect. Also, I probably would leave off the crumble – it’s delicious, but I think a few scattered pecans would be just as lovely, and would bring the decadence of this dessert down a notch!
Don’t let my notes deter you – this is still a lovely tart. I’m just an ordinary person muddling through most of the time and the beauty of cooking is you get the opportunity to experiment, refine and (hopefully) perfect recipes.
Details
40 min
35 min
1 h, 15 min
Ingredients
- 1 Large punnet strawberries, sliced
- Pie dough
- 100 grams Unsalted butter
- 100 grams Sugar
- 100 grams Flour
- 125 grams Pecans (chopped)
- pinch Salt
- 100 grams Cream
- 50 grams Whole milk
- 75 grams Sugar
- Vanilla bean scraped, or vanilla bean paste
- 3 Eggs
- 20 grams Cornflour
Directions
- Prepare the dough if you are making your own - use your favourite recipe.
- Prepare the pecan crumble (if using) by processing 100g butter, 100g sugar, 100g plain flour, 125g pecans and pinch of salt.
- Once combined and crumbly chill in the fridge for a few hours, or overnight.
- Preheat your oven to 180*.
- Line your tart tin with the pastry, then line the bottom with baking paper and beans or rice to blind bake.
- Blind bake the shell for 20 minutes.
- Meanwhile, make your custard.
- First prepare an ice bath to cool your custard.
- In a small saucepan bring the cream, 50g milk, 35g of sugar and vanilla bean to the boil. Quickly take off the heat.
- In the meantime, whisk the eggs 40g sugar and cornflour.
- Slowly, whisking all the time, add the cream mixture to the eggs. It is very important you do it this way, otherwise you will scramble the eggs.
- Strain through a sieve if using a whole vanilla bean, then cool the bowl in the ice bath.
- Assemble the tart.
- Fill the tart shell with custard. If you wish, bake for about 5 minutes until the custard firms up slightly.
- Layer the strawberries in concentric circles on top of custard.
- Scatter crumble mixture over the tart.
- Bake for another 10-15 minutes until the custard is almost set - it will continue cooking slightly once out of the oven.
- Cool, refrigerate and enjoy.
If you ever want to give me a gift (unlikely though that might be!) a surefire winner is always a cookbook. However, my bookshelf might have other ideas…
This recipe is adapted from a cute book J’s parents gave me after a recent trip to the Northern Territory: “Scrumptious Recipes from The Beanie Festival Teashop”.
It contains classic recipes, most of which are cakes, slices or pies and all of which look delicious. This one is really delicious.
I adapted this from the original recipe, which used cashew nuts. Pecans are one of my favourite nuts; they are grown in Australia and are in season at the moment. I think the marriage of pecans and maple syrup works wonderfully well.
The other beauty of this recipe is it’s very simple; there are really only two steps. You will need a set of electric beaters.
The cake is wonderful served warm (but not fresh from the oven, as the sugar will be exceptionally hot!) with a dollop of icecream. It makes a lot of cake – so I recommend making it when you’re having friends over if you like being able to see your toes past your stomach.
Details
15 min
60 min
1 h, 15 min
Ingredients
- 90 grams Butter
- 100 grams Brown Sugar
- 2 tablespoons Maple syrup
- 1 cup chopped pecans
- 125 grams Butter
- 150 grams Brown Sugar
- 2 Eggs
- 1 cup SR flour
- 1/2 cup plain flour
- 1/2 teaspoon Mixed spice (I just used cinnamon and nutmeg)
- 1/2 cup sour cream
- 2 tablespoons Maple syrup
Directions
- Preheat oven to 180 *.
- Grease and line a loaf tin.
- Make the topping first by beating 90g of butter, 1/2 cup of brown sugar and 2 tbs of maple syrup until smooth.
- Spread the topping over the base of the pan.
- Sprinkle with chopped pecans.
- Make the cake by beating everything else together on a low speed until combined.
- Then beat on a medium speed until the mixture is smooth.
- Pour the mixture over the topping and bake for about an hour.
- Stand for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool.
- Best served fresh and warm.
We went mulberry picking the other day. Foraging in local parks and community land is fun, free and easy if you know what you’re looking for. We’ve been waiting for these mulberries to ripen for what seems like an eternity, but this weekend we were fortunate. It did require some dexterity on J’s part, as the bushes had been stripped on the easily accessible side, so all the remaining ripe berries were overhanging the creek. We persevered and ended up with about 500g of mulberries. Not really enough to make jam, but the perfect amount for mulberry pie.
You’ll have to excuse the picture of the pie – it was delicious, but I haven’t quite mastered my pastry yet. This pastry is extremely short, which means it was very crumbly and quite difficult to roll out. I do think it’s worth the extra time and energy to make your own pastry, however if that’s too intimidating, store-bought will also work.
If you don’t have access to wild mulberry bushes, other types of berries would work well. You might need to adjust the sugar levels depending on the natural sweetness of the berries. Strawberries are in season in Brisbane at the moment and they are deliciously sweet. I would probably reduce the sugar if using them.
Ingredients
- 2 1/2 cups Flour
- 250 grams Butter (unsalted), chilled and chopped into cubes
- 1 tsp Salt
- 1 tsp Sugar
- Ice cold water (enough to bring the dough together, not more than 1/4 cup)
- 3 cups Mulberries
- 1 1/4 cups White sugar
- 1/4 cup Flour
- 2 tbsps Butter
- 1 tbsp Milk
Directions
For the pastry
- Combine flour, butter, salt and sugar in a food processor.
- Pulse until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
- Slowly add ice water, one tablespoon at a time, and continue to pulse. The dough should start to form a ball and hold itself together.
- Turn the dough out onto plastic wrap. Split into two pieces and wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
- Remove from fridge and allow to warm up slightly.
- Lightly flour your bench and roll out into two large circles.
For the pie
- Preheat oven to 200*.
- In a large bowl, mix berries with sugar and flour.
- Spray a pie dish with cooking oil. Line the bottom of the dish with one of the circles of dough.
- Add the berry and sugar mixture to the pie dish.
- Dot berries with butter.
- Cover the berries with the remaining pastry. You could try a lattice top - but it's more difficult than it looks!
- Brush the top of the pie with milk.
- Let the pie rest in the fridge for 30 minutes.
- Bake pie in the preheated oven for 15 minutes. I recommend putting your pie on another baking tray to catch any sugar syrup spills so you don't have to clean your oven.
- Lower oven temperature to 175* and bake for an additional 30 minutes.
- Remove from the oven and let cool to room temperature. You can eat whilst still warm but it will be runny and quite messy!
This recipe is from a blog I recently discovered called “Citrus and Candy”. If this recipe is anything to go by, the author is some kind of diabolical pastry-chef genius. Also, I would love to be able to take photo lessons from her!
Imagine rich chocolate ganache. Add in a homemade pie shell. Then consider the additional of caramelised banana…and raisins (or in my case, sultanas) soaked in rum. Now do you see what I’m talking about? This recipe is larger-than-life. As a result, it’s a little bit time consuming, and a little bit fiddly. No element is particularly hard, but it takes time. And the recipe stretches over two pages. So, this is not a quick dish to throw together before a bbq – it’s a labour of love. But it’s worth it.
As the recipe is so long, I won’t attempt to reproduce it here. If you’re interested, click here. One thing to note – prepare the pastry first as this is the most time consuming element. You can even do this the night before to save some stress on the day.
If you can’t be bothered making it, you might have to just ask me very nicely to bring it along when you next have a dinner party…
My (soon to be) sister-in-law made this fantastic souffle for dessert the other night. It’s really easy, really rich and just delicious. The recipe below makes 1 large souffle, so just multiply by the number of people you’re serving (obviously!).
Thanks for sharing Lucy!
Ingredients
- 25 grams Dark chocolate
- 1 tsp Cocoa powder
- 1 large Egg, separated
- 25 grams Caster sugar
- 1 tsp Grated orange zest
- 2 tsps Melted butter
- Caster sugar for sprinkling ramekins
Directions
- Melt the chocolate - a zap at a low temperature in the microwave will work, or else use a water bath on the stove.
- Prepare the ramekins - Brush with butter, stroking from bottom to top. Refrigerate then repeat the butter process. Coat with excess sugar, tip out the extra, then refrigerate until ready to put soufflé mix in.
- Add the cocoa, egg yolk and orange zest and mix well.
- In a separate bowl beat the egg white and slowly add the sugar until you get soft peaks.
- Add 1/3 of the egg white mix to the chocolate mix and mix gently, but not too cautiously.
- Add this chocolate mix back to the remaining egg white mix and fold very gently to keep in the air.
- Carefully pour into prepared soufflé ramekins.
- You can keep these in the fridge for a few hours before needed, they will just take a little longer to cook.
- Bake in a 180*C oven for about 15min or until risen, but still slightly wobbly.
- Serve with vanilla icecream.
This is only my second foray into the world of panna cotta, and as I am a novice when it comes to all things gelatine I took a “softly softly” approach. This recipe is actually terribly simple, but it does require some patience in waiting for the gelatine to dissolve. It is very important not to boil the gelatine or else you’ll end up with clumps that don’t taste particularly appetising.
This is a cheat’s version of raspberry coulis – you simply heat some frozen raspberries with some sugar (in the microwave works perfectly well!) until they soften and blend together. I really love the visual contrast of the bright red raspberry sauce with the cream panna cotta, speckled with vanilla bean seeds. The panna cotta was appropriately “wobbly”, and it slipped easily down the throat. The vanilla bean was strong and added so much additional flavour – far superior to vanilla essence (not that I’m knocking vanilla essence – it certainly has its place!).
Ingredients
- 1 whole Vanilla bean
- 300 mls Thickened cream
- 2/3 cup Milk
- 2 tsps Gelatine
- 2 tbsps Caster sugar
- 1 handful Raspberries (frozen are fine)
- 1-2 tsp Sugar
Directions
- Grease 4-6 ramekins with butter.
- Scrape vanilla bean seeds into a small saucepan, add cream and milk and pop in the vanilla bean pod. Stir to combine.
- Stand the cream mixture for 10 minutes - this allows all the flavours to infuse.
- Sprinkle gelatine and sugar over the cream mixture.
- Turn the stove onto low and stir the cream mixture steadily until the gelatine and sugar dissolve. It is very important not to boil - better to take a long time than to ruin it with impatience! You can tell when they are dissolve as the little lumps of gelatine will be gone when you look at the mixture on a spoon.
- Pour the mixture evenly into the prepared rammekins. Allow to cool to room temperature.
- Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 3 hours, or until set. You can leave overnight without any problems.
- Prepare the raspberry coulis - just a handful of raspberries with a teaspoon or so of sugar (to taste), and warm until the berries break down.
- You can serve the panna cotta in the ramekins if you wish, but for a bit of elegance, tip them out onto a plate and drizzle the raspberry coulis around. To extract more easily from the ramekins, try running a warm knife around the rim. I also found it helpful to keep the knife in on one side while tipping onto the plate, as this counteracts the suction effect.
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Two of my favourite blogs are Tartlette and Cannelle et Vanille. I believe both authors have French backgrounds and both seem to have a penchant for tarts. So it’s little surprise that when I had an excess of strawberries, and a ball of leftover pastry that I scoured these blogs for inspiration. What I ended up making took ideas from both ladies and mixed them up with some of my own.
08.10.10 | 
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