Fresh Fruit Tart

I've been doing quite a lot of baking lately and have been fixated on cake. It started with the carrot cake the day I bought my new Kitchen Aid but that was just the tip of the frosted iceberg. The most decadent chocolate cake came next, followed closely by coconut cake with lime curd filling. I've been bringing all these cakes to work with me and my coworkers are delighted, but I'd be lying if I said my husband and I weren't eating them too. Its enough already with the cake! I don't want to stop baking, but I need something light and refreshing for a change of pace. While wandering through the grocery store, I spotted mangoes on sale and was inspired to make a fruit tart. 

I've never made a tart before. I've eaten plenty of them, seen them being made on my favorite cooking shows and I even have a tart pan in my kitchen. This seemed like as good a time as any to whip one of these bad boys up. I did a little research and settled on a fresh fruit tart with pastry cream filling on which to rest an assortment of sliced mangoes, apricots and strawberries. I started with the pastry cream and as usual, I put my own twist on this classic preparation by adding orange zest.

PASTRY CREAM:

1 cup whole milk 

2 tbsp sugar

3 large egg yolks

2 tbsp corn starch

1 vanilla bean

1 tbsp orange zest

In a small saucepan over low heat, I gently heated the milk with the split vanilla bean and orange zest. Make sure when you split the vanilla bean you scrape out all the delicious little black vanilla seeds and add them to the milk. This is where all that delicious vanilla flavor comes from. In a medium bowl, I whisked the egg yolks, sugar and corn starch together to form a thick paste. When the milk was just beginning to bubble, I took it off the heat and added a half cup to the yolk mixture while whisking. This tempers the eggs so they don't curdle when you cook the custard. I poured the yolk mixture into the pot with the rest of the milk and put it back over medium heat. I whisked it vigorously as it came to the boil and thickened. The pastry cream is done when it becomes very thick and you can see the bottom of the pot when you run your spoon through it. This pastry cream looked particularly beautiful with the little black specks of vanilla bean and orange zest....and it tasted divine! I put it through a strainer, just to make sure it was perfectly smooth, covered the surface with plastic wrap, put it in the fridge to chill and licked every last bit off the spatula.

Next came the tart shell. I found a number of different recipes for tart and pie dough, but I wanted something that would add a nice crunch to the finished tart. The recipe I went with was so simple and called for sugar, butter, flour and a pinch of salt, but of course I had to put my own twist on it by adding chopped walnuts. 

TART SHELL:

3 tbsp sugar

1/4 cup finely chopped walnuts

1 stick melted butter

1 1/4 cup flour

pinch of salt

I put the sugar, salt and chopped walnuts in a bowl and mixed them together, then mixed in the melted butter. Finally, I added the flour and mixed this all together, Its a very wet and sticky dough, but is easy to work with. I pressed the dough into my tart shell and put it in the fridge to chill for 30 minutes. After it was chilled, I put it into a 350 oven and baked it until it was golden brown, which took about 25 minutes. The tart shell needs to cool completely before it can be removed from the tart ring and filled. It was a chilly day, so I set my tart shell outside for about an hour to cool. 

You can use any fruit you like for this recipe, as long as it’s ripe and sweet. I had the aforementioned mangoes, fresh apricots, strawberries and a few stray blueberries in the fridge. I put the pastry cream in the shell and spread it out to an even layer, then layered the slices of fruit on top in a pretty pattern. I put the finished tart in the fridge for a couple hours to set up. And how did it taste? WOW!! The tart shell was super crunchy and the nuts gave it wonderful texture. The vanilla orange pastry cream was a little loose and next time I will add a touch more corn starch, but it complimented the fruit flavors nicely. But the star of this show is definitely the fruit. The mangoes and apricots were ripe and juicy and this was the perfect canvas to showcase their beauty. I highly recommend this recipe for a refreshing summer dessert.