salted caramel and chocolate tarts, and strawberry and ganache tarts

When I made my mint and white chocolate mousse tart, I had way more chocolate crust than I needed, and I also happened to have a jar of salted caramel I’d made recently, and some strawberries. Naturally, the only thing to do was to make chocolate and strawberry ganache tarts, inspired by this tart from cupcakes and cashmere, and salted caramel and chocolate ganache tarts, which coincidentally were made on Masterchef later that night, does that make me a Masterchef? I hope so.

 

I made these tarts in miniature, because little food is cute, and I brought a couple to school the next day, much to my friends delight. I have since been asked to make one for a girl at school who said she’d pay for one, I’m not entirely sure what to do with this situation because I’d feel a bit stingy to make someone pay for one small tart, but if I bake her something, everyone else will want food too. Teenagers *sigh*.

 

choux puffs and a croquembouche

Choux pastry was my nemesis for a year or so. I’d made it twice, both times failing miserably, as all I seemed to be able to produce was sad, flat lumps of not-quite-pastry. I’m not sure how I managed to screw it up so badly, considering the first time I used the choux pastry recipe from the Sprinklebakes cookbook it was a raging success, can Heather Baird do no wrong?

I made choux puffs a few weeks ago without a hiccup, until I tried to make pastry cream and it was so delicious but also very runny. I then made a croquembouche.

 

lemon meringue tarts

I have never been sure what the difference is between tarts and pies. According to The Kitchn,
the humble pie (haha) is a sweet or savoury dish with a crust and a filling. It has a crisp flaky crust and is served straight out of the pie dish; it can have a top, a bottom or both. A tart, on the other hand, is cooked in a pan with a removable bottom or a pastry ring. Tarts don’t have a lid, and the pastry is usually firm but a bit crumbly, like a biscuit. Most people tend to describe this recipe as a pie, however I have decided that it is a tart because it is topped with meringue, not pastry, and the crust is biscuity and sweet, rather than flaky and crisp.

Eating one of these is like biting into a cloud. The meringue is very light and airy, and the lemon curd was so citrus flavoured that if not for the meringue, would have been overwhelming. I felt pretty smug after making these little tarts, as the contestants of The Great Australian Bake Off made lemon meringue pies last week, and unlike theirs, mine didn’t leak, weep or crack. Although one must remember that I spent a leisurely six hours making these whilst watching Teen Wolf, and they had only a couple of stressful hours to do it. The curd and meringue recipes are from here, and the crust recipe is from here.

baked churros

I am a proud visitor of the yearly National Folk Festival in Canberra, where my family and I have spent every Easter for over a decade. The music is awesome and perfectly folky and each year we return home with a couple of new CDs. The highlight of the festival used to be the daily churros I would have, dipped in rich Italian hot chocolate. Until the churro stalls stopped coming.

 

I have always been a lover of all things doughnutty, however I can’t stand frying, I’ve fried churros a few times before and always end up with a few minor burns, dough all over my hands and a plate of tasty yet too-greasy churros. When I came across this baked version in my frequent trawling of the Sprinklebakes blog, I knew I had hit the Spanish jackpot, particularly since I was planning a Mexican themed 18^th birthday dinner (churros are Spanish, close enough?). My friends devoured them, perhaps because I am unusually pushy when trying to get people to eat my food and I peer pressured them into it, but the general consensus was that they were delicious.