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So damned good
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It's been a while, blahdeblahblah, and I just don't have the energy or brain capacity to try to catch up in any way so I'm just popping in with a bit of a recipe post that ignores world events pretty much entirely, noting only that it is berry season.
Because it's raspberry season and Big Brother Farms has had some particularly lovely berries on offer. Coincidentally--or not--I have fond, if distant, memories of delicious fruit tart birthday cakes. I don't remember where those tarts came from--in fact, I'm not even sure where I was living when I was having them on my birthday--but I've been feeling nostalgic for them. Sadly, they seem fairly unobtainable now, at least if you need to transport them via Metro or bicycle, so I realized that if I was going to have the tart of my dreams, I was going to have to make it myself. [Note: this isn't my actual birthday cake; more of a self-indulgence that happens to be happening during my birthday month.]
I looked online to see what I could find, but my beloved love&lemons' offering was underwhelming, and I figured that if they were failing me, there wasn't much point in spending more time googling. A scant hour or two later, I stopped googling. I turned to Julia but wasn't exactly sold on her recipe either. I thought to see if Joy had anything useful and found that when it came to fruit tarts they, like Julia, thought in terms of custard, though they included a lot of what the Rombauers themselves might term "Cassandra-like warnings" about the likelihood of the custard becoming watery or ridden with deadly bacteria or both. One way or another, I was put off custard.
Which left me with my own book of recipes accumulated over the decades. I decided that what I needed was a meld of two recipes I'd not made in decades: an apricot cream tart and Gina's raspberry pie. At last, here's the recipe:
[Well. Almost. I was fully focused on making this thing before it got any hotter in the house so I didn't even think about taking photos of the process. This is straight text, no helpful--or distracting--visuals.]
To make the crust:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/8 tsp salt
6 tbsp butter (cold)
2 tbsp shortening (cold)
3 tbsp granulated sugar
1 egg yolk
3 tbsp very cold water
1/2 cup almond flour (aka ground almonds)
Combine flour and salt in medium-size bowl. Cut butter into small pieces and then work butter and shortening into the flour/salt until it's all pretty thoroughly blended, but still sort of coarse. Mix in the almond flour and sugar. Stir yolk into cold water and add that combination to the dough; stir until it's all evenly moist/properly combined. Gather dough into a ball and let it sit for ten minutes.
Grease a large tart pan, bottom and sides. Roll out dough to be large enough to cover bottom and sides of tart pan. (The rolled-out dough should be sturdy enough that it can be folded--gently--and shifted to the pan.) Prick dough all over with fork. Chill for thirty minutes.
Preheat oven to 375°F. Place beans or second pan on top of crust to prevent it from puffing up in oven and bake for 15 minutes. Remove the beans/additional pan and bake an additional 15 minutes. Set aside to cool. Remove pie shell from pan once cool.
Vague directions on making what I'm calling the "dairy base":
[This is where I seriously winged things so all amounts are approximations. Taste as you go and aim for a spreadable texture.]
Roughly 4 - 5 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup (very much more or less) sour cream
1/4 cup superfine sugar (I'm sure regular granulated would be just fine too)
Combine all ingredients in a small bowl and beat (by hand or with mixer) until thoroughly combined. Mine definitely was not entirely uniform, meaning there were some bits of uncombined cream cheese since I kept adding more as I went. It worked just fine.
The original recipe from Gina used the term "berry sludge" for this vital element:
1 cup raspberries
3 tbsp cornstarch
1 cup sugar (I used granulated)
1/2 cup orange juice (or other juice or plain water)
a few sprigs of fresh lavender
Mash up the raspberries and put them into a pan along with the cornstarch, sugar, and juice over medium (or medium-high) heat. Bring to a boil while stirring pretty constantly. I used a wire whip. Once it has somewhat thickened, drag the flower end of the lavender sprigs through the mixture to add some lavender flavor and, very likely, some lavender seeds and/or flowers. Once the mixture is congealed but still liquid enough to scoop out / pour, remove from heat. Remove/discard the remains of the lavender.
Combine it all!
Spread the dairy-rich base across the bottom of the cooled baked shell. It should cover it maybe a quarter inch thick--likely less. I lacked the nerve to try to go up the side of the shell, but that might have been a nice touch.
Have 5 cups of nice-looking raspberries rinsed and ready to add. Place them pointy-tip up in concentric circles to cover the entire surface. Ladle / pour the somewhat cooled sludge over the top, trying to cover every berry so the whole thing glistens. Chill for at least three hours before serving.
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Mother and Child tarts (there may have been some shrinkage)
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As it happened, I had a bit more dough than needed for my tart pan so I made a sidecar tartlet. I topped that one with apricot and chopped almond, rather than raspberry, and the glaze consisted mostly of heated up/strained apricot preserves though I used the unwashed raspberry sludge pan so I picked up a hint of raspberry as well. This was, essentially, a mini-version of the original apricot cream tart recipe. It was also utterly delicious.
