This sexy beast boasts a sweet shortcrust pastry base, layered with lemon curd topped with a lemony coconut-almond frangipane-style filling, finished off with a slightly tart poured icing. It is also responsible for an extra pound I've been carrying around since Spring Break.
Disclaimer: This is just a baking saga recorded for posterity, with the entire dysfunctional thought process stemming from my pastry neuroses. TL;DR: recipe here.
This lovely tart had been on my mind for quite some time. It's no secret that the Great British Bake Off has given me a virtually unquenchable lust for frangipane in general, and Bakewell tarts in particular. But more to the point, I had been nursing increasingly strong cravings for a) coconut and b) moist, dense cakes. This promised to fulfill both cravings at once, although that did not stop me from making a moist, dense cake too (just in case; more on that later).
Besides, it was a good excuse to keep chipping away at my nemesis... pastry. No other category of baked goods has yielded this many baking fails. Some of these stem from pure stupidity (hey, pastry flour must be even better than all-purpose, right?), yet the cause of many mishaps remains unknown to this day. Please understand this: I read about pastry. I watch videos about pastry. I reflect upon pastry. I understand the theory of pastry. I think through the execution (okay, most of the time) of pastry. And yet...
Sweet shortcrust pastry, however, has generally been kind to me. My mincemeat tarts came out just fine, if a bit dark. So to go with John Whaite's original recipe for the tart's filling, I went with a pâte sucrée endorsed by another blogger. The Thomas Keller crust recipe makes enough for two tarts. I am glad I decided not to halve it... My goal was, of course, to freeze it for later, not to start over. (Despite my repeated failures, the pastry Dunning-Kruger effect is strong.)
I took my time with this dough.
I let it chill and rest after assembling it.
I chilled it again after rolling it out.
I gave it slightly thicker, reinforced edges around its entire perimeter. (OK, I may have gone overboard there.)
I chilled it once it was in the pastry case.
I docked it.
I blind-baked it with beans. And then without the beans. (Got a little nervous about a crack along one edge, at this point.)
Then, I carried on with egg whites for extra soggy bottom insurance policy. Popped it back into the oven.
That's when shit hit the fan:
I was going to crop this picture but then I thought about the fact that my mother will most likely see this picture and cringe at the sight of a half-sheet pan that evidently could do with some steel wool action. So here you go: what my sheet pans really look like.
Through what, in hindsight, was a combination of too warm a crust and too thick an egg wash (should've thinned it with water despite my fear of soggy bottoms), the dough cracked as the egg wash dried and shrank. It eventually split altogether, down the middle and along that inner edge. I had no choice but to eat the destroyed crust with some leftover ricotta filling from the mafroukeh and start over.
For my second attempt at the pastry crust, I was even more careful with the dough and the reinforced edges. To be extra safe, I even used carton egg whites (super thin) for the wash, and waited for the crust to cool slightly before applying it. Where I screwed up the second time was by docking the dough with the first fork I could find, which had thicker tines than normal. The holes seemed quite large and deep when the crust came out of the oven and I worried the juices from the filling would seep through. What does a slightly obsessive compulsive baker do? She takes leftover dough and plugs the larger individual holes, and uses a paint brush to get egg whites into the smaller ones. (What? The pastry traumas run deep.)
Ok, let's fast forward past the precious moment when I felt accomplished and slightly British as I made my first lemon curd. I used this recipe, but with one extra yolk and only 1/3 c sugar to balance out the sweet frangipane filling - Nate typically finds my Bakewells too sweet.
In hindsight, I probably didn't even need to worry about the egg wash, much less filling in the docked holes, as the curd was very thick. Just to be safe, I let it sit on top of the crust until it felt slightly dry on the surface. I was not going to skip any pastry precautions.
Let's also fast forward past the uneventful assembly of the filling. I used unsweetened shredded coconut (for you Americans reading "desiccated coconut" and wondering if you should use Angel Flake. NO.) Whereas I typically prefer my frangipane with the brown bits of skin and slightly coarser texture of sliced almonds run through the food processor, I used only blanched almond flour for this one. Coconut must be the star!
Everything was going smoothly. The top of the pastry crust was a bit dark in the end, but I can live with that.
And then, I got too @nal for my own good when the time came to ice the pastry. Because I had Instagram in mind, I took my sweet time to drag the (thick) white icing as precisely as possible to the edge of the crust with the world's tiniest offset spatula. I used as thin a coat as I could, again for Nate's sake.
By the time I was done and went to pipe the yellow icing (made with lemon juice instead of water, and super tart), the white layer had already set. See for yourself:
I could not accept this mediocre result as the culmination of, essentially, a day spent in the kitchen (granted, making all sorts of other foodstuffs and squeezing in some pretty serious cardio, but still... a day. On a Bakewell tart.)
I scraped off as much of the icing's surface as possible, trying to leave the perimeter intact. Remembering my sugar cookie frosting experiences, I added about 1 tablespoon of corn syrup to the icing, this time (King Arthur Flour recipe). The corn syrup ensures the icing dries hard (when applied as a thin coat) and shiny, but will initially make your cookie icing runnier and slower to dry. Exactly what I needed.
Of course, partially scraping and reapplying icing has exactly the effect you'd imagine on the overall thickness of the overall product, but at least I got to make the classic marbled pattern:
I thought about tracing beta, alpha, theta, and delta waves but I felt like that would be tempting fate. Also, trying too hard to be cute and nerdy. (Considering the fact that I can barely pipe a straight line - see below - I am not sure one would be able to recognize four distinct waves in my take on those EEG patterns, either.)
So, at 2 AM, regretting that our food photography studio (the dining room table) was so cluttered with tart pans and ingredients, all I could muster was a poorly lit phone picture or two. It was an ordeal, but I will make this tart again. It tasted absolutely beautiful. The bright lemon-coconut pairing is to die for. The contrast of the tart curd and creamy, rich filling is refreshing... (For some reason, the coconut flavor comes out more distinctly on the second day, at which point the tart was at its best in my opinion.)
Even Nate liked it, though I had to "help" him by eating at least 80% of the tart. Back to my #januarypants yeah.