Strawberries have been in abundance at the markets recently, so I made this easy tart for morning tea last Sunday.
It’s simple to make – I used June’s sweet pastry dough (defrosted from the fridge) to line a quiche dish and then blindbaked it until golden. I’m sure packaged shortcrust pastry would work just as well.
This was filled with a batch of microwave pastry cream, and then topped with halved strawberries. The boys loved it!
Here’s the microwave pastry cream recipe again (with metric conversions added)…
- 2 cups (500ml) full cream milk (I used UHT)
- 6 large (59g) free range egg yolks (use the whites for meringues)
- ½ cup (110g) white sugar
- 1/3 cup (45g) cornflour (cornstarch), sifted
- 1½ (8ml) teaspoons vanilla extract
- 3½ tablespoons (50g) unsalted butter, at room temperature, cut into small pieces
Step 1: In a large pyrex bowl, mix together the milk, sugar, cornflour and vanilla extract. Whisk well to combine, then microwave on high until hot but not boiling (in my 1100 watt micro, this took two minutes). Remove from the microwave, whisk well to smooth out any lumps.
Step 2: In a separate bowl, whisk egg yolks together until smooth.
Step 3: Continually whisking, pour the egg yolks into the milk, mixing until smooth. Microwave on high for one minute, then in 30 second increments, whisking after each burst, until the pastry cream is thick. In my microwave, this took 2½ minutes.
Step 4: Whisk well, then add the butter pieces and whisk them into the pastry cream until smooth. Press a sheet of cling film to the surface of the cream to stop it forming a skin and store in the fridge until cool.
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Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 