I don’t like pumpkin pie, to put it mildly. I find the basic untweaked pumpkin filling quite horrid, not much better than canned pumpkin itself. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Maybe I am being weird.
The pumpkin concentration in this recipe is just right to my taste, as well as the silky smooth texture of the crème.
These are probably the last berries of the season (how sad…) They are topping the coconut pastry cream filling and a thin layer of raspberry-white chocolate ganache below. And yes, there’s more coconut in the tart shells, too.
Before you wrinkle your nose and leave my site, let me quickly tell you that this combination is very, very good. I probably wouldn’t serve it to toddlers; I doubt they will appreciate it. But a more mature audience will be certainly pleased.
My big thanks to my dear friend Olga who provides me with fresh rhubarb from her garden every season.
Here’s another Daring Bakers’ Challenge. This month it’s a British Bakewell Tart – buttery shortcrust shell filled with jam and frangipane. We were given a complete freedom to choose any jam flavor for the filling. And that’s where I got carried away. The thing is I love making jams. I could do it all day long, it really does relax me. I also like the sight of jewel-like glowing little jars lined on my counter near the window. So, I made 4 varieties of jam plus banana-caramel for a company.
Respectively, there are five different kinds of mini tarts as follows:
I played with marzipan a bit (had some leftovers after the recent project) and made fruits and vegetables for garnishing the tartlets.
Thanks to Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar for hosting the challenge.
Opening a package of phyllo dough for one project often means another one is following soon (you do have to utilize the leftover before it dries, gets brittle and unusable). In this case, I put to use not just the remaining phyllo, but also the vanilla cheesecake trimmings (it took all my willpower not to it eat them right away).
A perfectly baked cheesecake is soft and creamy at room temperature. It can be whipped and differently flavored. I added lemon zest to the cheesecake scraps, beat them until creamy, then folded some whipped cream which turned the mixture into an airy mousse. I piped the mousse over lemon curd and wild blackberry jam-filled tiny phyllo tartlets, and topped it with the fresh berries and pistachios.
The cheesecake is a quite rich dessert where a little goes a long way. Unless it’s been served to a huge crowd, there’s always something left over, no matter how fabulous your cheesecake is (it seems everyone counts calories and worries about cholesterol content these days). So, this might be a way to turn the leftovers into a new dessert, without basically any effort at all. If you don’t have any cheesecake sitting in your fridge, but want to give these tartlets a try, you can follow this Milk Chocolate and Salted Caramel Tart recipe for making a filling (no need to bake a cheesecake especially for this), just double the amount to fill all 24 shells. And, if you use different jams and curds under the mousse, it makes sense to mark the tartlets by arranging the berries differently. Otherwise, you may end up like me – poking the tartlets with a skewer in a search for the lemon curd-filled one after eating three in a row filled with the jam.
There are total of four layers in this tart and I’m not counting the tart crust as a layer. At the very bottom there are honey roasted salted peanuts covered with fleur de sel caramel. Then goes a layer of barely sweetened tangy sour cream-cream cheese mousse followed by the milk chocolate pastry cream. The egg whites left over after making pâte sablée and pastry cream were turned into Swiss meringue topping and then blow-torched. It tasted fantastic. Every layer is equally thin (well, except the Swiss meringue) and harmoniously compliments each other. The filling is sweet and salty, and creamy; the crust is buttery, chocolaty, crispy and tender.
Some components can be made in advance, but the assembled tart should be enjoyed (and it’s pure enjoyment) the same day it is put together.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who hasn’t celebrated their Thanksgiving yet! And I’m off until Saturday. I’ve got a lot of catch up to do visiting your blogs, guys. I haven’t had a lot of time lately, so - my apologies.
