S2E2 Technical: Lemon Tart

I'm still here! I haven't stopped baking, but my challenge bakes haven't been going too well recently. My celebration cake caused two meltdowns (first the cake and then me) and my quiche turned out to be more of a squiche (is that funny? It's funny in my head). Because of this, I have decided to make a few changes to my blog plan: 

First, I have decided to relax the challenge timings. Since I don't allow myself time to practice any of my bakes, I want to remove the added pressure of the time limit. This will hopefully make the bakes more enjoyable right to the end. Second, I am going to slow down my posting rate. I haven't been feeling much motivation to write blog posts recently and I'm not sure if it's because I'm not as proud of my results or if I'm running out of steam, but I'm hoping that by giving myself more time to write each post, I will be more excited about writing, rather than seeing it as an obligation. I'm doing this for fun after all! Finally, I have decided that I don't have to complete every challenge in order. Many of the challenges are repeated from season to season, and one of the things stalling me right now is the fact that I don't want to bake another 24 miniature tarts. I already know that I can make them and I can't be wasting my money and ingredients on the same things over and over again.

I also would like to quickly thank everyone who has reached out to me requesting bakes recently. I have absolutely loved having the opportunity to exercise my creativity and it feels so amazing to be paid to do something that I do for fun. Please keep the orders coming!

Now that that's out of the way, the challenge continues!

Today's bake is the tart week technical challenge; it's time for a lemon tart! This was the last bake that I completed within a time limit, and I had one and a half hours. 

 I started with the pastry. This is Mary Berry's recipe and she recommends the use of a food processor, so I started by blitzing my flour, icing sugar, and margarine together until the butter was no longer visible. 

I added my ice-cold water and egg yolk and continued blitzing until the dough came together. 

I shaped the dough into a disc and then rolled it out. 

I then transferred the pastry to my pie dish, cut away the excess, docked the base with a fork and placed it in the fridge to chill for half an hour.

I had enough excess dough to make another small tart and I wasn't about to waste it!

It was then time to mix my custard. I used a fork to mix my eggs, sugar, cream, lemon zest and lemon juice together in a measuring cup.

Then it was time to blind bake my pastry case!

Once the pastry was cooked, I trimmed the excess. I had left enough pastry around the edges to account for shrinkage, but I now think that I should have trimmed it right down to the edge before baking. Trimming the baked pastry resulted in a rough, cracked edge, and I think that I had chilled the case enough to prevent any shrinkage in the first place. Yet another teaching moment.

I poured most of the filling into the crust and placed the whole tray in the oven. Once safely in position in the oven, I quickly and carefully poured the in the rest. 

I baked the tart for just over 30 minutes, but I think that I let it bake for a little bit too long because the edges of the filling came away from the pastry. 

I dusted the entire whole tart with icing sugar and voilà!

I didn't cut into the tart until a few hours later, so the icing sugar melted/disappeared before the sliced photo, but I wanted to document the final product and how well it set! I was very pleased.

It was a tart and it was tart, but I'm not complaining! It screamed lemon, and all of my taste-testers were very happy. If I were to make this again, I would hopefully use a proper tart tin and I would be more attentive while the custard was baking to avoid the separation between custard and pastry. On the bright side, I did not break down and the eggs set properly! I call that improvement. 

Recipe used:

Pastry and tart filling: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/tarte_au_citron_94480