Classic Fruit Tart (ABC)

Being a big fan of fruit tart, I'm happy that the Avid Baker's Challenge baking group is baking classic fruit tart for the month, July 2012. This classic tart recipe is from the book, The Weekend Baker by Abigail Johnson and I would love to try baking this recipe.

Here are a few things that I really like about this recipe... 

(1) Being this busy mum, I can make individual components of the tart whenever I can find short periods of spare time and assemble them together at the time when I need to serve this tart. Brilliant!

(2) Unlike most traditional pastry cream, this one is so light and beautiful! It is mainly made of milk and I can substitute the cream with a lighter whipped cream. Instead of whipping my own cream, I have conveniently used the one from a whipped cream dispenser and it works very well for me.

(3) Versatility of fruits used. Although the original recipe mentioned the use of mixed berries, I can substitute the fruits with any seasonal fruits that are the freshest and easily available in the market. I reckon the gold kiwi is most beautiful fruit to eat at our current winter season. Unlike the green ones, these gold kiwi are so sweet. My son and I can easily eat up to six of these kiwi fruits per day. Unfortunately, we had to stop at this amount because these kiwis are actually not cheap as compared to other fruits in the market.

My family and I really enjoy eating this tart. My only regret is that I should have been more generous with the amount of ingredients for make my 19 cm tart pan. I reckon that the half amount of the recipe that I used is not enough to make my 19 cm tart, resulting my tart crust being too thin and also slightly fragile to handle. Lucky for me that the tart crust "survived" when I unmolded it from the pan. However, the assembled tart broke into pieces when I cut it to serve, and so my family and I just ate this tart by pinching bits and pieces of it from its serving plate... and licked our fingers while finishing it.

 

making the pastry cream

so light and delicious vanilla cream

making and baking the tart pastry

So light and flaky... but sad that it's a bit too thin. Despite the cracks, I'm lucky that the tart hold its shape.

Top the pastry with vanilla cream and slices of these kiwi... Yum!

This recipe is mostly adapted from the book, The Weekend Baker by Abigail Johnson Dodge.

Briefly, the following points are the modifications that I have made from this recipe.

• Using half amount of this recipe, I've baked 19 cm tart crust at 180°C fan forced for 15 min being blind-baked with the pie weights and another 5 min without the weights. I reckon this amount is not sufficient enough to bake my 19 cm tart as both pastry and cream were too think for my tart.
• Instead of using whipped cream with 35% fat, I replaced it with the lighter one from a whipped cream dispenser.
• Instead of using vanilla extract, I use vanilla beans from 1/4 of a vanilla pod for half amount of the recipe.
• Instead of mixed berries, I use two gold kiwi fruit for my tart. They were peeled and thinly sliced.

This post is linked to Avid Baker's Challenge (July 2012). To see the other ABC members' bakes, please go to ABC site. If you would like to join ABC , please contact Hanaâ.

Happy Baking
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