Ecclefechan Tart

During one of my recipe hunts on the internet, I came across this recipe for Ecclefechan Tart. I hadn't heard of this tart before, but I was very much intrigued by the recipe, and thought it sounded delicious. 

For the pastry:

• 250g plain flour
• 125g unsalted butter
• Pinch of salt
• 50ml whisky

For the filling:

• 150g unsalted butter
• 150g light brown sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 150ml double cream
• 1 tablespoon black treacle
• 300g mixed dried fruit
• 1 teaspoon finely chopped stem ginger
• 1 lemon
• 1 orange

I was particularly interested in the concept of the whisky pastry. Being a lover of whisky, I just coudn't wait to give this a go. I even sacrificed some whisky from my own collection:

Mmmm, Jura Superstition. Yum!

I preheated the oven to 180°C before making a start on the tart. The pastry was quite a tricky one in the end. I rubbed the flour and the butter together as usual, to create a breadcrumb-like mixture. Now, usually when I make shortcrust pastry, I use beaten egg to bind the ingredients together. However, there was no egg in this recipe, but 50ml whisky instead, which seemed to make the pastry a little difficult to handle at times - it had a nasty habit of falling apart, but I eventually got it to work well enough. I must admit, there was some patching required, but it all came together, just about.

Pressing it into the tart tin, the base was then pricked with a fork, before being covered with baking paper and filled with baking beans. It was then baked for 10 minutes in the oven, after which the baking beans were removed and the pastry baked for another 5 minutes.

Whisky pastry - what a great idea.

Once the pastry had baked, the base was drizzled with delicious treacle.

It started off smartly before descending into a mess.

Then it was on to making the filling.  First the butter and light brown sugar were creamed together.

So much sugar and buttery goodness.

Then the eggs were mixed in, before the double cream was aslo added and mixed in.

Doesn't look too inviting yet.

Next I filled the pastry case with mixed dried fruit (and glace cherries), and then grated lemon and orange zest on top.

Looking good.

The cream mixture was then poured on top (carefully). I found that the quantities described in the recipe produced more of the cream mixture than was actually needed, so there was about a third of it left over in the bowl after I'd added it to the fruit.

Ready for the oven.

The tart was then baked for 40 minutes (the recipe calls for 30 minutes, but I found that it needed an extras 10 minutes before it was fully-baked). It came out of the oven looking rather nice.

Mmm, looking very nice indeed, and it smelt amazing.

I moved it to a cooling rack and then let it cool for half an hour before cutting out the first slice (my mum had demanded to try it).

Cooling and still smelling amazing.

Once a slice had been cut out for my mother, I took it into work with me, where is was pronounced as a success. The combination of the fruit, citrus zest and cream was beautiful, and the whisky pastry was lovely. As there was no egg in the pastry, it had a very different texture to that of normal shortcrust pastry; instead it was more of a biscuity texture, that was actaully very pleasant. Another success at work, it was left on a counter in the work kitchen for people to help themselves, and I found that it had gone completely after just fifteen minutes.

Yum!

Beckie.

Tarte au Citron

Once again I must admit to being influenced by The Great British Bake Off. As an adoring admirer of Mary Berry, I finally bit the bullet and attempted her Tarte au Citron for the first time. I was very interested in the idea of trying out a new sweet shortcrust pastry recipe having relied on the Crazy Kitchen shortcrust recipe for so long.

Having watched the episode of the Great British Bake Off where they made the Tarte au Citron, I was very conscious of the fact that it would be very, very easy to over-bake the lemon filling. In fact this was very much the case for my first attempt at making this tarte. As you can see from the photo, the filling has started to separate from the pastry, and in fact in the centre of the tart there was a fairly large crack in the filling. This is a wonderfully tart and flavoursome lemon filling, which is one of the tastiest recipes I've ever tried.

Mildly successful Tarte au Citron

Again undeterred I decided to keep trying to make this tarte successfully. It is really easy to over-bake this tarte and I have done so several times. I have also come across problems with pouring the filling into the pastry case; sometimes it just overflows and other times simply sliding the tarte into the oven causes some filling to spill over and to make the pastry soggy, which can cause the pastry to collapse. This means that you can lose some of the tarte when you try to remove it from the tin after baking. However, this doesn't take away from the delicious flavour of the tarte, and it has always gone down very well with L, my housemate, and several other friends of mine.

Beckie.

Custard Tart

By the time the summer rolled around, I'd had a decent amount of practice making shortcrust pastry (I'd basically made a LOT of treacle tarts), so I finally decided to have a go at making an old family favourite: the custard tart. Once again, I turned to the BBC Food website, and after some searching I came across an intriguing recipe, this Honey and Date Custard Tart by James Martin. Now I'm not the biggest fan of dates, so I decided to leave them out, and just have the honey. Using the same shortcrust pastry from The Crazy Kitchen's Lemon and Ginger Tart recipe, I made my usual pastry case, and then moved onto making the custard filling. This is actually a fairly simple filling to make, the main thing to watch out for is burning the cream when you boil it. I got lucky with it this time, but I get the feeling that it could be just a matter of seconds between just-boiling cream and burnt cream.

After whisking the boiling cream into the egg yolk and honey mixture, I carefully poured the filling into the pastry case and then gingerly transferred it to the oven. 20 minutes later, this was the result:

Slightly over-done, but still tasty.

The only problem here was the fact that the tart filling was slightly overdone. In my desperation to get the custard set, I'd left the tart in the oven about five minutes too long. However, the flavour was not compromised, and I loved the honey flavour that came with this custard filling.

Despite the relative success of the honey custard tart, I really wanted to make a traditional custard and nutmeg tart. Using the same James Martin recipe, I simply left out the dates again, and substituted the honey with 50g caster sugar, put in a few drops of vanilla essence, and added half a teaspoon of nutmeg into the custard mix. Once the filling had been poured into the pastry case (made following The Crazy Kitchen recipe yet again!), I then sprinkled yet more nutmeg over the top to give the custard tart that traditional look. This time I timed the bake perfectly, and the custard was beautifully done, with a beautiful hint of nutmeg and vanilla.

Yummy custard tart.

As you can probably see, the pastry was very thin (not necessarily a bad thing), which meant that there were a couple of cracks in the side of the case that appeared when I moved the tart from the wire-rack to the plate. This is a common issue for me, but I'd rather have a thin and crispy pastry than one that is too thick and stodgy.

This has become one of my favourite recipes to make, and was even requested by my parents when I went to stay with them for Christmas. This time I made excellent use of the leftover pastry scraps, rolling them out and making custard tartlets along with the main tart.

A family of custard tarts.

I must say, they all went down very well with my parents; it's always nice to hear that my parents like your baking (they'd experienced my poor cooking skills in the past, and have been pleasantly surprised by my baking renaissance), and it's particularly gratifying to hear that they liked my version of a long-time family favourite. That makes it one of my proudest baking successes in my mind.

Beckie.