We've just barely started back into school again and they give us not one, but two tarts to make in one practical. They really have a lot of faith in our skills. And to think of how we struggled to finish just the lemon tart in basic!
The Strawberry-Cassis tart was really quite a breeze to make. We used pate sablee for the crust and baked it with a thick layer of almond cream, speckled with blackcurrants. After it cooled, we topped it with pastry cream and arranged rows of fresh strawberries and a mound of blackcurrants on the top. Personally, I find the blackcurrants are much too tart, my mouth puckering with every bite. When I made it at home, I used white currants instead, which are a little less tart and I added a few bits of strawberries in the almond cream with them.
The Passion-Raspberry Tart is to die for delicious! But also bloody difficult to make. The passionfruit cream is temperamental - literally. You have to add the butter to it when the cream is just the right temperature, then you use an immersion blender on it, but only until it's just mixed. Overmix and you might end up with a chunky butter mess. Add the butter too early and you'll get a soupy mess.
Above is the tart I made in class, which turned out pretty awesome. The pate sablee is topped with passionfruit cream, a disc of raspberry coulis, then more passionfruit cream. Then you cover it with a glaze flecked with passionfruit seeds.
This is my second attempt, pitiful little thing that it is. The passionfruit cream really threw me this time. I'm going to blame it on my not having the right equipment, using a food processor instead of an immersion blender. What started off as a beautifully smooth cream turned into a pebbled mess. I wanted to put it over a bain marie but was afraid that it would affect the gelatine in the cream. So I stuck with it, and then added a bit of chunky glaze on top to reinforce the aesthetic. There would have been some passionfruit seeds as well, but the freshly-bought $5 passionfruit was foul.
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