Damn tart!

I occasionally attempt ambitious cooking projects. This occurs because I have been  lured by keywords "rich, indulgent, silky" etc or by pictures. I am very susceptible to pictures. So when I saw this...

I mean. Come on.

I am helpless in the face of this. Raspberry and meringue and white plates and scattered fresh raspberries. I was lucky not to eat the computer.

As it turned out it was my turn for bookclub and in a totally inadvisable move I decided to make two BRAND NEW dishes. One dish could be seen as clever, two is simply showy and ostentatious and that is why my second one failed. Not miserably, but sort of in a melancholy way - a regretful, half hopeful manner. I wish it had been miserably, then I could have thrown them away. As it was I ended up serving them. I also made a hedgehog slice with dark chocolate and prunes soaked in Cointreau - they were freaking excellent. Very decided. Forceful. Like a naval officer returning for one night and then heading out to sea again, a man with something to prove and a uniform.

(Rose) and Raspberry Meringue Tarts 
Extolled by taste.com.au. 

• 435g packet Careme Vanilla Bean Sweet Shortcrust Pastry (see note below re expensive pastry)
• 500g fresh or frozen, thawed raspberries, plus extra to serve
• 2 tsp rosewater (*see my general disgust about rose flavoured things below)
• 1/3 cup (50g) arrowroot
• 2 tbs lemon juice
• 260g caster sugar
• 4 eggs, separated
• 50g unsalted butter

When someone writes a recipe and casually says that you should use some very expensive pastry that can only be bought from a sect of nuns in the Hebrides then you should probably stop there. I didn't, I forged right on and actually hunted that exact pastry down. It was $10 a packet. A small packet. Which is frankly ridiculous. It's very nice though and I'm going to my grave saying that.

I bought frozen raspberries and that is also not cheap - this is another reason why I couldn't give up on this recipe at the end - so very much had gone into it - hopes, dreams, sweat and approx $25 in ingredients. "Plus extra raspberries to serve" I laughed out loud at that.

Puree the raspberries - I advise that they are room temperature - so if you have had them in the freezer then let them warm up or microwave them a bit. They won't yield as much juice if they are cold. From this we can extrapolate that warm things yield more juice. Make of that what you will.

Gabe: Erg! What is that!

Push them through a sieve into a pot - this isn't as hard as it sounds and gave me plenty of time to reflect on the pastry and how to make the most of it.

Once you have have extracted the juice you could add the rosewater at this point if you wanted. *I HATE all things rose flavoured, except for roses, which I don't eat. Turkish delight is a revolting, soft, gelatinous rose flavoured abomination. Two ironies about me and Turkish delight: I played the White Witch in a stage version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and had to sing about Turkish delight. I plausibly feigned love for it every night for two weeks - making me, probably, one of the greatest 15 year old White Witch's there has ever been. The other irony occurred only a week ago when I was informed that I had won a competition at my local shopping centre and my prize was a kilo of Turkish delight.

So I didn't add the rosewater.

Mix the arrowroot and 80ml of cold water in a small bowl and stir until nicely combined. Add the arrowroot mix, the lemon juice and 1/2 cup sugar to the raspberry juice and whack it onto a low heat. Cook for three or four minutes until thick and then add the egg yolks one at a time beating with a wooden spoon after each. Add the butter, stir until melted and take off the heat. 

My first mistake occurred somewhere in the italics. 

Not thick. Not evenly vaguely thick.

Mistake 1. The mix didn't thicken like I expected it to. I think that it needed to cook longer after the eggs were added. Or before. At some point it was meant to get thicker. And it didn't. Chill for 30 minutes. Or I recommend overnight. I wish I had been able to.

Pastry time. (Preheat the oven to 180c)

Wafting of money and vanilla.

I rolled the Careme pastry out, and it was very eye catching - $10 worth? Hard to say. I had already decided that I wasn't making a group of six medium sized tarts - instead I would go for a more user friendly size and push circles of pastry into muffin tins. My second mistake is coming up.

Mistake 2. Line the tins. Whatever you do woman/man, line the tins.

Just darling! But.. sadly, staying in there forever.

I didn't line the tins. It's weird because I am normally a tin lining freak! I will line anything metal that stops moving long enough. But not in this case.

This story has so many sad things happen in it, it's like Watership Down without the rabbits. Anyway. So far the raspberry "custard" is as flimsy as a teenagers excuse for that mark on their neck and the pastry tarts aren't coming out of that tin without a fist fight.

I blind baked the pastry. I'm not describing that. Look it up. I am too despondent to go into real detail regarding the pitfalls of blind baking - if there are any. I suspect there will be.

I then poured the mix into the cases and watched them wobble about. Then I put them into the freezer and they wobbled about. Then I baked them again. At this point they formed a sort of resistant surface and I decided that was good enough and I piped meringue on them and grilled them for about 2 minutes.

I'm not coming out of here.

And that is what they looked like. Actually very sweet. But veeeeeery tricky to get out and also very wet.

But they tasted good. I am making this MF recipe again and the next time I am adding concrete to the mix.