I saw this recipe for a strawberry chocolate tart with lemon caramel (scroll all the way down for the recipe), and I was immediately intrigued. I mean, it’s a tart. I love tarts. And the strawberries looked beautiful on that tart.
But I wasn’t as ambitious as Irvin from Eat the Love, so I just used my usual tart crust recipe instead of trying out his fancy chocolate tart shell with the mesquite flour and two types of cocoa powder. Maybe one day, when I’m closer to becoming a master baker.
I also simplified the lemon caramel by omitting the cinnamon stick. OK, let’s be honest, it’s because I didn’t have one on me.
I’ve also noticed that these baking blogs tend to show you a picture of the finished product and then present the recipe. Although my blog will never truly be considered a baking blog, I can at least pretend that it is, for at least this one post.
Bam! So here’s the recipe.
Strawberry Tart with Lemon Caramel
For the top, 1 pound of strawberries, washed, dried, hulled and sliced.
Tart Crust
1 cup flour
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened
Mix these in a bowl until it comes together into a dough, and then press that into a 9-inch tart pan.
Pastry Cream
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 cup white granulated sugar, divided
1 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 tablespoon unsalted butter
Whisk the egg and egg yolk together with the salt until they’re well-mixed. Then add the flour and 2 tablespoons of sugar in, and whisk until combined.
Then add the milk, lemon zest, vanilla extract, and the other 2 tablespoons of sugar to a saucepan, and bring this to a boil over medium heat. While whisking the egg mixture, pour the hot milk mixture in a thin stream into the eggs. When that’s all mixed together, return everything to the saucepan. Keep stirring this until it becomes thick like pudding.
Then take this off the heat and add the butter, stirring until it melts. Pour into a heat-proof container and press some plastic wrap onto the surface so that a skin doesn’t form, and then stick it in the refrigerator.
Lemon Caramel
1/4 cup strained lemon juice
2 tablespoons water
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon white granulated sugar, divided
1 tablespoon corn syrup
First, put the lemon juice, water, and 1 tablespoon of sugar in a saucepan, and heat it until it boils and the sugar dissolves. Pour this out into a small bowl.
Then put the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar and the corn syrup in a saucepan, and heat it on medium heat until it starts to melt. Keep stirring, preferably with a wooden spoon, until it starts turning a brown color. The color of caramel. Then turn off the heat, and let it continue to turn a darker shade of brown using the residual heat from the stove.
The heated lemon juice mixture can then be poured over the caramel. It will bubble and sputter a lot. Stir this until there’s no hard pieces in it, and then pour it into a bowl and let it cool.
Now you can assemble the tart by first putting the pastry cream in a layer on the bottom of the tart. Arrange the strawberry slices on top of the pastry cream, with the tips pointing outward. Brush with the lemon caramel.
That’s the recipe. It went pretty smoothly. Until the end.
The tart crust, pressed into the tart pan.
After 10 minutes in the oven, it’s done. Maybe a little overdone.
The pastry cream. It’s almost exactly like the pastry cream I usually make, just with lemon zest added. Oh, and there’s about half as much, compared to how much I usually make.
I put a layer of the pastry cream in the bottom of the tart. The original recipe says to press it through a fine mesh sieve, but I totally didn’t. Hence the lumps.
The strawberry slices on top, with a big one in the middle.
The aerial view. The big strawberry in the middle is slightly off-center…
Here’s the lemon caramel. Now since I didn’t have a brush, I ended up just spooning it over the tart…
It ended up looking pretty good. Well, except for the pools of lemon caramel that formed. I spooned the entire amount of lemon caramel on top, when the recipe said to “brush” the top, which I assume means just enough to get the strawberries wet, not pouring the whole thing over. Oops.
The recipe also said “serve immediately,” but I took this to a housewarming party, where it sat for hours. I actually had to leave the party early, so I never got to taste it. I just hope it wasn’t unbearably soggy.
Lesson learned: if a recipe involving brushing some liquid on top of a dessert says “serve immediately,” I should put the liquid in a separate cup and take it with me to a party instead of putting it on top at home and letting it sit for hours. Or something like that.