Oh, The Tart of my Heart

Welcome to tart week my friends! We are finally back to bringing home yumminess everyday, rather than a large sculpture once a week. John was pretty pleased ;) And we did indeed bring home at least one tart everyday! It was pretty exciting! (and please, remember to keep your drooling in check ;)

We had a new instructor this week, Chef Pierre. He’s a WORLD baking champion. Yeah, it’s really cool. I liked him a lot. He is from Alsace, France and has an awesome French accent. Anyway, he taught us tarts this week.

We started off with a baked fruit tart. I put apricots in mine. Yum. We learned how to make dough and roll it out into a tart shell. Then we filled it with almond cream, fruit, and topped it with granulated almonds.

We made mini ones too…and mine were a little full. And exploded.
We also made LEMON tarts! We LEMON CREAM! (if you recall the cake program, I’m addicted to a little obsessed with lemon cream…) We made a lemon cream tart with French meringue and it was SO YUMMY. Here are my little meringues ready to be baked.
And a little bowl of deliciousness i.e. lemon cream and meringue. MMM! Favorite so far.

We also made a lemon curd tart! The main difference between the two lemon tarts is that you bake lemon curd. You add lemon cream into the tart shell and do NOT bake it. But BOTH are simply divine. We topped the lemon curd tart with piped Italian meringue, which was then caramelized in the oven for a few minutes to give it a nice color. (sorry if the color doesn’t look all that appetizing in the picture…it’s the lighting. I promise)
It was fun to do some snazzy piping on them. I piped the big one so that it can be cut into 6 pieces and each piece still looks pretty on its own. Cleve, eh? ;)

We made a chocolate tart, filled with chocolate custard and topped with chocolate nougatine crisp..WOW that was a lot of chocolate!

Then at the end of the week we made these tart/pastry/cake thingies. I’m not really sure if they are actually tarts…but anyway, the first was called a St. Honore (SAN OH-noh-REH – really deep in your throat, guttural-like ;) It was made with inverted puff pastry, pate a choux, and crème legere )CREM leh-ZHER). Here is our puff pastry with piped pate a choux, ready to go in the oven.

Here is the puff pastry all baked!

Oh yeah, did I mention the thing will be surrounded by CREAM PUFFS?!

We filled the pate a choux with pastry cream and dipped them in sugar on the top, and then on the bottom to glue them to the cake.

Then we filled the center with crème legere and topped it with some berries and voila! ;)

MmmMmmMmmm…yum. The last one we made is called a milles feulles (and I’m pretty sure I spelled that wrong and I don’t have my book with me to check… but you say it MILL FOY) And it’s basically layers of puff pastry with pastry cream in between. I think this one was really pretty :)

And that was tart week! Next week I may or may not have a post because it’s EXAMS! Dun dun dun…wish me luck! I hope everyone has had a good weekend! :)