I had an hankering for a lemon tart a few weekends ago, inspired by the brilliant sunshine and bearable temperatures as well as the cloudless sky. As I've mentioned, my favorite flavor is lemon and my favorite color is yellow and tarts are well, well they're tarts. I've been making desserts lately based on what is available at the farm stand and that day the blueberries looked perfect in their cartons surrounded by sunflowers and honey.
My Rose Bakery cookbook has a recipe for lemon blueberry tarts, which is where I got the idea at least subliminally, but in reality I was just really craving a lemon tart and spontaneously decided to add blueberries to the mix.
It turns out that the combination of blueberries and lemon curd is beyond any lemon tart I've ever had. The blueberries compliment the sweet curd with an interesting tang and now I'm not sure I will ever be able to have just a lemon tart again.
To begin, I made the tart sweet pastry from the Rose Bakery's recipe, which
you can find here. After you cool the crust in the refrigerator, roll it out and put it in your tart tin or pie plate. You can also brush it now with a beaten egg for a glaze. Then put parchment paper over the crust and pour rice over it (this is called blind baking and it keeps the shape of the crust without a filling to weigh it down while it rises).
Bake this at 425 F for 15-20 minutes (depends on your oven so watch the crusts to make sure they don't burn). In the meantime, make the lemon curd. I use
Tea and Sympathy's recipe, but I doubled it and it was just enough for two tarts. When everything was cooled, I sprinkled blueberries all around the top of the tart.
There is nothing like a pie on a hot summer night. Sometimes I wish that you could bottle a moment, patent an olfactory preserver that would capture the feeling instead of just the one frame that a camera does. Some foods are proxies for this imaginary mechanism and they halt time whenever you eat them, transporting you to the first moment you had them.
Nice!
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