I love summer fruit custard tarts; I mean really love them. I’ve always figured they were too much trouble to make, but they’re also expensive to buy. Since I’ve been getting more comfortable with various doughs I figured it was time to try my hand at tartletts. I had a coupon for Sur la Table and splurged on a dozen little 2-inch barquette molds (the diamond shaped ones) and got to work.
Yesterday I made the shortcrust dough (the Le Petit Sweets vanilla shortcrust) and baked off the tart shells. I learned that a thin dough is easiest to roll out on well floured parchment, rather than on a board - not shocking, but good to know. Filling the barquette molds is a bit of a pain. You have to cut largeish rectangles, gently fit them into the molds (stretching the dough as little as possible), and then cut off the excess dough with a sharp knife. Then you MUST freeze the dough in the molds to minimize shrinkage and strengthen butter containment. Trust me. Once baked the shells popped right out of the molds. The round tartletts were baked in mini-muffin tins. That worked well enough, but they just aren’t as pretty as the diamond ones.
This morning I made pastry cream (the King Arthur flour recipe), which was a lot easier than I thought. The only real trick to it is to whisk the hell out of the cornstarch to minimize lumps and to temper your eggs before you add them to the hot milk.
I’ve got the shells and pastry cream separate and plan on filling the shells as I want to eat them. I don’t want to let the filled and topped tarts sit for more than an hour or the shells will get soggy.
All in all this turned out really delicious and I will definitely be doing it again :)
