Strawberry Mascarpone Tart

I have always wanted to make one of those fancy fruit tarts that you see in French bakeries with the perfect crust and the glossy fruit. After picking two flats of berries, I had more than enough to try different recipes, so I picked out the prettiest ones to put on display on my tart.


We went to our favorite local fruit farm to pick some fresh berries, which is a very comforting and nostalgic activity for me as this was my first job growing up. I would pick strawberries straddled over the rows of berries for hours. So, leisurely picking two flats is a cinch.

We had a school picnic to attend, so I thought this would be a good seasonal dessert to bring along. I had saved aside this recipe from Food 52 for the perfect occasion and this was it.

I tried my best to arrange my strawberries nicely to match their pristine arrangement. Below is the Food 52 tart image followed by mine.  Not bad, right? The recipe is below and updated to include all the ingredients along with a few notes so go ahead and try your own strawberry t(art).

Recipe for Strawberry Mascarpone Tart

Adapted from Food 52

Ingredients:

Crust

2 tablespoons cream

1 egg yolk

1 stick of butter

1/4 cup granulated sugar 

1 1/2 cups flour

1 pinch salt

Filling

1 quart strawberries (washed, hulled and sliced)

8 ounces chilled mascarpone

1 tablespoon rum (I would suggest leaving this out)

1/4 cup sugar 

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

 Directons:

For the crust: Combine the egg yolk and cream. In a food processor, pulse together the butter, sugar, salt, and flour until you have something that resembles coarse meal. With the motor running, pour in the egg yolk and cream. Process until the dough comes together in a ball around the blade. Remove dough from the processor bowl. Bring together into a ball quickly. Press into an 8-inch removable-bottom fluted tart pan. Pierce lightly with fork all over the crust. Butter the shiny side of a piece of aluminum foil and cover the tart pan tightly. Freeze for at least two hours. 

Preheat the oven to 375 F. Bake the tart pan (on a baking sheet) for 15 minutes. Remove the foil and continue baking another 10 minutes. Allow the crust to cool completely. 

Combine the sliced strawberries with remaining 2 tablespoons sugar. Allow them to rest for 15 minutes. While the crust is in the oven, start on the filling. Combine the mascarpone,  2 tablespoons of sugar, and vanilla extract and whisk until glossy. (NOTE: the filling may separate if the mascarpone is not chilled so work quickly.) If you like the taste of rum, go ahead and include it, but I felt that even the small amount overtook the creamy mascarpone flavor too much. Taste and adjust sugar if necessary. Chill the filling while the crust cools. When the crust has cooled completely, spread the filling over it using a rubber spatula. Next, arrange the sliced strawberries over the the filling. Return assembled tart to fridge if not serving immediately, but it's best served the day it is made.

Strawberry Creamsicles

I didn't do a lot of baking over the summer with it being so hot out. So, these popsicles were fun to make in the heat and definitely enjoyed.  My sister sent me this great ice pop book for my birthday and I decided to put it to use.

I like these classic popsicle molds and she sent me the molds to make them too.

They were very easy to make with blending the strawberry mixture and using vanilla yogurt to alternate in the mold and create the yummy strawberry creamsicle.

Strawberry Ice Cream

This is most likely my last strawberry creation (at least this week). Strawberry season will last a little longer and I may be further inspired to try something else....a tart perhaps. After three batches of strawberry freezer jam, cookies and several fresh eaten strawberries, I decided to preserve the final few quarts of strawberries with cream, milk, sugar and pure vanilla in the form of some homemade strawberry ice cream.

I soaked the strawberries in sugar and fresh lemon juice all morning and mashed the strawberries to get some good juice to color the ice cream. I mixed the cream, milk, sugar and vanilla with the fresh strawberry juice and crushed strawberries and put it in my Cuisinart ice cream maker.

When it first comes out of the ice cream machine after about 25 minutes, it has a nice soft gelato like texture.

We sampled some and it was AMAZING and the rest went in a freezer safe container to freeze more to enjoy later.

Strawberry Jam

The primary intention of buying a flat of strawberries this past week was to make strawberry jam. It's my favorite jam and making it homemade just has a much more fresh flavor and isn't too sugary like the jello-like jelly or jam you buy at the store. I have boil-water canned jams before, but I chose to make freezer jam as I've typically done before. It's so easy and I also like not having to fret over whether my jars will seal properly. I can just let the jam set and store them in the freezer for up to a year. So, several quarts of strawberries later, I now have around 30 jars of bright red jam ready to enjoy this next year.

The longest part of the process is preparing the fruit. But, while watching my favorite Food Network shows, I stemmed, hulled and washed all my strawberries.

I like the jam to have nice chunks of fruit in it, so I just crushed the berries with a potato masher vs. pureeing them in my food processor.

I mixed the Sure-Jell pectin to help it set in with the sugar and brought it to a boil.

The pectin-sugar mixture was blended with the fruit and then I spooned it into all my jars.

My favorite use of strawberry jam is for scones. I had some in the freezer, so I thawed them and delivered some fresh jam to my mum and we had afternoon tea together with fresh baked scones and strawberry jam.

Strawberry-Shortcake in a Cookie

I wanted to come up with something to bake for my dad for Father's day and received the "Cookie of the Day" e-mail from Martha Stewart for Strawberry-Shortcake Cookies. I don't always try the recipes or even save them to try later, but it's always fun to see different cookie ideas. Many of them are not traditional cookies, but it's always good to go beyond the everyday chocolate chip cookie and try something different. And, that's what I did.

My dad LOVES strawberry shortcake and could have it for dessert almost every evening (and most likely does most days). So, I thought it would be fun to try this recipe to give him his strawberry-shortcake in a cute little cookie.

I go to the farmer's market at least once a week and sometimes several times a week. With strawberries now in season, this was a good recipe to try. I also ended up buying over a flat of strawberries this past week, so there are a few more strawberry creations on their way. Fresh Michigan strawberries are SO much better than the grocery store variety shipped in from California or who knows where else. Even just having the flat of strawberries sitting out on the counter in my kitchen for a few hours, the sweet fresh smell was permeating through the house and brought me back to the days when my sister and I would pick strawberries as a summer job growing up.





This was definitely more of a biscuit-cookie and included the dry ingredient in which butter was cut in and then the fresh diced strawberries.



I made them without the use of the Kitchen aid as I didn't want to crush the strawberries. I cut in the butter with my pastry blender and then the cream was added. This was making the making of the shortcake and the whipped cream is just folded into it to give it a nice rich creamy flavor.




I used my cookie scoop to measure out the batter and place on the pan. I was careful not to have the fresh strawberries end up on the bottom of the cookie so they wouldn't burn while the cookie was baking. Before they went in the oven, I sprinkled some caster sugar (really fine sugar) on top which adds a nice glistening sugar and crunchy texture to the cookie.



Here are the cookies just out of the oven. They turned out nicely and tasted great, but were best warm. They also don't last too long with the fresh strawberry, but I suppose you could try freezing some, which I suggested to my dad if he wasn't able to finish them off very soon.




I have a few of the pretty strawberry quart baskets and chose to package them in there like the lovely quart of fresh berries used to make them.

Berry Good Layer Cake

My husband's birthday was last weekend and I wanted to make him a special cake. I haven't tackled a layer cake for quite some time, so I questioned him about what flavors he wanted and researched recipes. He wanted a white cake with fresh strawberries in the filling and a whipped cream topping. I had fun looking through my cookbooks, iPhone apps and online for different recipes and came up with a light vanilla cake recipe, white chocolate buttercream and fresh strawberries for the filling and a whipped cream frosting. I referenced four different recipes to make the cake and had all my recipes and ingredients prepped and ready to go.

I started with preparing my springform pans. I used two 9" non-stick pans, but still buttered them using a pastry brush, put a circle of parchment on the bottom, buttered the parchment and then covered the inside with flour. There was no way my cake was going to stick!

The cake batter was made with cake flour and used only egg whites, which were whipped and folded into the batter to make it airy and light.

I filled my buttered and floured springform pans and they were ready to bake. I put them on cookie sheets just in case the batter seeped out (which I was happy it did not), but it still made them easy to take in and out when I was checking them. I was careful to turn them and switch racks part way through and made sure my cake tester came out clean. They were nice golden brown and I let them cool a bit before I took them out of the pans and peeled off the parchment. I also trimmed the tops off each of the cakes to make them flatter. I think I could have trimmed them a little more to make the layers even more flat and clean.

Now it was time to make the filling. I had used several egg whites for the cake and I was happy I didn't have to waste the egg yolks and used them for the white chocolate buttercream filling. I slowly cooked the egg yolks and sugar, then added in the white chocolate and cream to melt down. This mixture cooled and then I added the butter to make the buttercream. I would have liked this to be a bit more thick, but it was thick enough and tasted great.

I spread a layer of homemade strawberry preserves, a layer of the white chocolate buttercream, a layer of fresh strawberry slices, another layer of buttercream and then put another layer of strawberry preserves on the second layer that went on top of the top layer of buttercream. This is where it got a little messy.

Maybe I should have chilled it prior to adding the top layer, but I didn't think of this first and it was oozing a bit when I added the second layer. I was generous in how much filling I included, but in the end we agreed that there could have been even more. I think a lot of it soaked into the cake as well. I smoothed off the edges as much as I could and chilled the cake at this point before attempting to frost it.

For the frosting, I was concerned about using just simple whipped cream as it has so much moisture and I didn't want it to seep into the cake and be a watery mess. So I looked into making swiss meringue, but ended up finding a recipe for stabilizing whipped cream so it wouldn't do what I was worried about. This involved using unflavored gelatin that was dissolved and added into the whipped heavy cream along with some sugar and vanilla. The stabilized whipped cream was easy to make and amazingly easy to work with. I finished it off with a warm wet spatula to make a smooth glossy top. I did save some aside to pipe on top of the cake later, but that didn't work out as the gelatin did something during this time and wasn't as nice and glossy when I attempted to do this. So, I tried to smooth it out again as well as I could, but that's why it ended up looking a little messy, I mean homemade.

Since the piping on top didn't work out and I was a bit short on time before we wanted to put birthday candles in and sing, I simply smoothed it out as well as I could and added a few fresh berries to the top. Given a little more time, I would have put some shaved white chocolate on the top or sides and slice the fresh berries.

The cake was so nice and moist and had a great taste. I'd like to try using more filling next time and work with different fillings to mix up the flavors. I'd also like to work more with the decorating and get out the pastry bag to add a little more flair. However, most importantly, Sean said it certainly satisfied his request for his perfect birthday cake!

Baby Cakes in Raleigh

On my recent visit to see a friend in Raleigh, North Carolina, she was sweet enough to take me to a few pastry hot spots in town to try some baby cakes with my baby cakes. Audrey has definitely caught on to the concept of "treats" and definitely knows how to say "cupcake." On our girls' day out, we went to The Cupcake Shoppe Bakery near downtown Raleigh. It was a very nice place and quite the after dinner dessert hot spot. They had a very classy bakery and eating area. I loved the marble counters (which are just like what I plan to have put in our kitchen) and gorgeous displays. Cupcake bakeries are quite the trend and I always like to check them out.

The cupcakes were mouth watering and gorgeous. I could have tried one of each, but had to hold back. My friend's daughter just wanted a pink cupcake and Audrey would have taken any of them. I think she would have wanted to try the cookie monster cupcake they had, but the strawberry cupcake sounded better to me. I also got a coconut cupcake to try later. They were all piped exactly the same with a tube tip and different adornments to match their flavor, like a little carrot for the carrot cake cupcakes.

Here is our "Pretty in Pink" cupcake that was fresh strawberry cake with strawberry buttercream.

As you can see, Audrey LOVED it! She took the fork and kept going for the frosting.

Another day, we went to the Hereghty Heavenly Delicious Patisserie. We shared an amazing quiche for lunch with a side salad and perused the pastry selection for something to have for dessert. It was definitely more of a European bakery with lots of different cake and torte selections, puddings, custards and some traditional bakery items, like croissants.

They also had a tray of all different french macarons and of course I was interested in trying these after having made them recently myself. They had a nice flavor, but were much smaller than the ones I made and I think they need to be larger since they are so airy and light.

We ended up sharing a chocolate almond Vienna cake that was very dense and rich, but had a great taste. Thanks again to my best girlfriend for a great visit and taking me to check out these bakeries.