Evening ladies and gentlemen (Now that I know there are)! How goes it at yours? I’ve been doing something very unethical lately- I’ve been bunking work and snuggling in my warm corner, baking, taking photographs, having coffee and measuring my bites while it pours outside without any regret or guilt. I woke up on Tuesday morning and I realized that by no means can I see that cold blue swank office anymore. I needed some homey-ness in my life ya know? So I, very unethically, without informing anyone went absconding from work for 2 days. You want to guess what happened? They mailed the work to me!!! They know I’d be online from home and I’ll see it. And If I see, I’ll do it. Morons know me well. See why I need desserts all the time?
Anyway, all that hibijibi apart, here’s a deli dessert that I think you’ll absolutely love. A friend of ours got us the most beautiful, ripe, golden yellow mangoes from his farmhouse and i couldn’t think of anything else but mango tartlets- so beautiful and flavorful they are. Unlike a lot of other recipes, I did not use creme-patisserie but made a vanilla custard for the filling, mixed mango puree to it, assembled it on homemade tart shells and topped it with cubed mango, chilled in vanilla sugar. Yum yeah?
Now, this is a little more than the dump and go recipes that I usually preach in here- this involves 3 distinct sections out of which, 1 step is really delicate, which is the tart base. I say this is delicate because you’ll need to constantly keep your hands cold or you’ll end up with a hard pastry. And since this is the most difficult part in the recipe, I’ll talk about the pastry base first. But before that, here are the 3 steps that are involved:
1. Making the custard
2. Making the tart base
3. Chilling the mango cubes in vanilla sugar
Onto the Basic tart Shell Recipe
Tart Shell Ingredient
2 cups of plain, all purpose flour
125 grams chilled butter, cut into cubes
A bowl of ice with water
Directions
In a bowl take flour, a pinch of salt and butter. If you have a pastry blender, very well. If not, you can use a thin fork to cut through the flour and the butter.
Mix it till it resembles the texture of cornmeal or wet sand
Now, pour ice water to it 1 tbsp at a time and mix it with a fork to form a dough.
Turn it in to a floured clean surface and by touching it bare minimum, roll it into a dough. (keep aside some ice and keep rubbing your hands in ice)
Once your dough is ready, on a floured surface roll it out to about 1/4th of an inch thick
Cut rounds with a cookie cutter.
If you have individual tart tins, you can simply press it in and blind bake. But if you don’t have them, turn over a muffin tin and press the rounds in shape of a bowl. Make sure you have no air in them. Also, you’ll bake it inverted! That’s what I did.
Oven Temperature
Preheat in 250 and bake for 10 minutes in 180
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Onto the Custard for our mango tart
Ingredients for custard
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla paste or extract
2tbsp caster sugar
2 cups milk
Directions
In a sauce pan boil milk. if using vanilla paste or bean, add to the boiling milk. If using extract- later.
In a bowl whisk eggs and sugar
When the milk is about tepid, add some to your egg mixture and whisk well
Let the milk boil and take it off heat
Now, very gently and in a continuous stream add your egg mixture to the milk. Whisk well and put it on stove on sim
Whisk constantly till it thickens
Take it off heat and let it cool
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Chilled mango cubes in vanilla sugar
Fill a glass with caster sugar and a vanilla bean. If using essence, mix the sugar and the essence well and let dry
Chuck in the cubed mangoes very gently and put it straight into the chiller
Mango Puree
Mango pulp + caster sugar
Blitz it for about 30-45 seconds
Chill
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Assembly of mango tart
Mix custard and mango puree (2tbsp)
Take your tart shell
Pour in custard
Top with chilled mango cubes
Serving Suggestions
Vanilla Ice-cream
Whipped cream (Secretly telling you to serve with this)
Honey
Cook it, Take a bite and let me know! Best part is, one of ro’s friend came over and he very sweetly picked them up and gobbled silently. When he reached for the second one, I knew someone else too thinks they are top-notch 😉
That’s it for today, trumatter needs TV
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It’s a little warm for baking here right now, but this is a good one to file away for later. I’ve never had mango tarts and they look delic!
Thank you Maureen. I can assure you that you’ll love it 🙂
Yummo ! I have never made pastry .. yours are so perfect ! Looks nice and flaky !
Its easy once you get the hang of it 🙂
Lovely! I laughed out loud and your great photos. What do you use to edit them with text like that? Besides, it is summer and ants like to invade my kitchen so I’m constantly battling.
Haha… I use photoshop or picmonkey 😛 I have eaten loads of ants in my lifetime i guess- simply because im too lazy to pick each one of them out 😛
Delicious!