The Pastry Case
I made the citron tarte on Tuesday as I needed to use the double cream for the lemon filling before it went out of date. I made my pastry case under the watchful eye of my son, Thomas, which meant trying to read the recipe whilst keeping him entertained. The "How to Bake" book says to make the pastry using a food-processor but I don't own one so I had to make the pastry by hand.
I put the flour, butter and icing sugar into a bowl and mixed the ingredients until they looked like breadcrumbs. Then I was meant to add the egg yolk and water to the mixture, however at this point my son got rather bored of watching me cook and began to have a bit of a mini melt down. This caused me to rush mixing the pastry and in my haste I managed to completely forget to add the egg yolk to the breadcrumbs. I only realised this mistake later on after I had baked the pastry case by which time it was too late!!!
Once my pastry had been mixed and shaped into a ball the recipe told me to give my pastry plenty of time in the fridge to firm up and relax before rolling it out. By now my son had started screaming at a rather alarming pitch to get my attention so I had to abandon my dough ball on the kitchen surface and go and calm him down. My poor dough ball did not get chilled in the fridge at all and by the time I returned to the kitchen feeling rather frazzled, I decided just to get on with it and roll it out.
As I don't own a fluted loose-based tart tin, I decided to use my quick release 23cm cake tin. Once I rolled out my pastry I gently lifted it into my cake tin. I was rather concerned that I did not have enough pastry as it did not overhang over the sides of the tin. In fact my pastry only made it half-way up the sides of the cake tin.
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| The pastry in the cake tin |
The pastry case has to be baked blind before the filling is added as this prevents a soggy bottom. Reading through the recipe it suddenly dawned on me that I needed some baking beans to fill my pastry case with and I did not have any. It was too late to put Thomas in the pushchair and go up to the shops to get some so I had to do some improvising. I used the base of my sprung sandwich tin as its quite heavy and this did the job really well. After lining the pastry with foil, I placed the sandwich tin base on top of my pastry base and baked it for 15 minutes in the oven.
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| The improvised "baking beans" |
After removing the foil and sandwich tin base and I returned the cake tin to the oven and cooked the pastry for a further 10 minutes.
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| My baked pastry case |
The filling
The filling was very easy to make as I just had to whisk together the eggs, double cream, caster sugar, zest and juice of the 4 lemons. When I started to break my eggs into the mixing bowl it was then that I realised that I should have added an egg yolk to my pastry mixture. I did consider making the pastry again but decided that it would take too much time and by now I just wanted to finish making the tarte. If the pastry did not taste very good then least I will remember for next time.
Once all the filling ingredients had been whisked together I then put the mixture into a jug. I poured the filling into my baked pastry case and put it into the oven at Gas Mark 3.
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| The pastry case with the uncooked filling |
The recipe says to bake the tarte for 30-35 minutes but my citron tarte took 50 minutes to cook. I think the temperature of my oven is not very accurate as I had to turn it up to Gas Mark 4 to speed up the cooking process. Once the centre of the tarte was set I took it out of the oven and left it to cool.
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| The finished tarte au citron |
The verdict
After the disaster of leaving out the egg yolk and not having all of the correct equipment I did not have high hopes for my tarte au citron. However it turned out really well and tasted stunning. The pastry was fine without the egg yolk and the lemon filling made my taste buds tingle with every mouthful.
I think I will make next week's recipe when Thomas is asleep to ensure that I don't leave any of the ingredients out!!!
Next Week's Baking Challenge:
Almond Croissants
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