Fruit Tart with Pastry Cream

Recently, I made my first fruit tart of 2011. I love making them because the fresh fruit on top makes it look really pretty and colorful, and yet it’s deceptively simple to make. I love the combination of the brown sugar crust, the sweet pastry cream, and the tartness from the fresh fruit when you take a bite of the tart.

I’ve always used this crust, after I stumbled upon the recipe here. The recipe on that page is for a 12-inch tart pan. Since I have a 9-inch tart pan, I scale down the ingredients to 3/4, and it works out very well:
1 cup flour
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
I just mix these together, no stand mixer needed. Then I just press it into the tart pan, bake it for 10 minutes at 400F, and it’s done.

Only 3 ingredients! And it has a nice butter and brown sugar flavor. (Astute readers might notice that the bottom of a 9-inch tart pan actually has 9/16 the area of the bottom of a 12-inch tart pan, not 3/4 like I used for the scaling above, but I think this works out well because I like a thicker crust.)

The pastry cream is also easy. I use this recipe from Allrecipes.com.

The pastry cream isn’t overly sweet, and I think it’s not as unhealthy as you would think, since it’s mostly milk, not cream. The amount of butter is also minimal. OK, so it’s not like vegetables or anything, but it’s a lot better than whipped cream or something.

After the pastry cream cools in the fridge, I just put a generous layer of it in the crust.

Even after putting so much pastry cream in, I still have some left over to snack on later!

Now what’s a fruit tart without fruit?

I used four kinds of fruit this time: oranges, strawberries, mangoes, and blueberries. Now the tricky part is getting all of this fruit into that little 9-inch tart…

OK, so I couldn’t fit anywhere close to all that fruit on top of the tart. But I had a nice little fruit salad for myself with the leftover fruit.

I like making a little flower-like structure in the middle, just to give it some height. The edges were perhaps a little light on fruit; I probably could’ve overlapped some strawberry slices to get more fruit on there.