Gourmet Therapy

Preparation: 25 minutes
Cooking time: 3 minutes to make the custard cream or 33 minutes if you haven’t pre-made the pastry.

For this recipe, the only cooking time involved will be to prepare the custard cream, and blind bake the pastry (see recipe) in your oven. The rest is all preparation time as the strawberries will need to be used fresh to decorate the pastry and custard cream.

Alternatively, you can buy the pastry frozen, already made from the supermarket and blind cook it (although my pastry recipe is very simple and delicious!)

It is a great and decadent dessert, adored by the French. Perfect for an Aussie summer dessert as strawberries are becoming cheap!

Ingredients:

Custard cream:

250ml milk
1 egg
30g flour
40g sugar
1tsp vanilla bean paste or vanilla essence/extract
1tlsp rum

For the decoration:

2 punnets fresh strawberries
2 generous tbsp cranberry jelly
2 tlsp water

Custard Cream Preparation:

Pour milk in a pot and add vanilla paste.
Bring to the boil.

On the side, in a mixer bowl, mix the egg and sugar until you obtain a creamy mixture. Add flour and continue mixing.
While mixer is working, slowly and steadily poor in hot milk (on your egg, sugar and flour mixture). Keep mixing until all combined.

Pour your mixture back in the pot and put back on the stove. Carefully, continue simmering and mixing by hand until you obtain a thick mixture / custard (at this stage, I usually add a couple tbsp of rum!). Remove from stove and let cool down.

Pastry Preparation:

Follow my pastry recipe or use commercially made pastry.
Blind cook pastry for 30 minutes in a baking dish at 120 degrees.
Remove from oven and let cool down.

Decoration and final touch:

Pour cold custard over cold pastry.

Wash and cut strawberries in half. Arrange them on custard as shown.

Put cranberry jelly and water in a small pot and bring to the boil or until jelly is dissolved, and thick.

Using a pastry brush, immediately cover all strawberries with cranberry jelly mixture. Let jelly dry and refrigerate the tart.

I recommend to eat this strawberry tart the following day as the pastry will absorb the flavour of the custard and fruit.
Serve cold with tea or coffee.

Yummmmmmmm…

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