When it comes to making a tart nothing beats homemade sweet pastry dough! Jamie Oliver’s head chef pastry articulates it perfectly in his post on tips for perfect homemade pastry: “Making your own pastry may seem like a slow and intensive process, but that’s the joy of it. Comfort food isn’t just about the way something feels or tastes when you eat it, it’s also about how you make it and what goes into it.” When you are a full time mummy trying to multitask looking after four boys, cooking, cleaning and teaching languages online, the thought of having both hands tied into a sticky dough is not something you are longing for, especially when you have a baby crawling on the floor and touching things he shouldn’t! However homemade sweet pastry tastes so much better than the shop-bought stuff and it doesn’t take so much time to knead the dough, plus it actually freezes well. When I feel stressed out I usually go to the kitchen, put some music on and get my hands sticky. It is so relaxing and therapeutic!
The other day, I sent out my boys to pick a few plums from the trees nearby our house and they came back with more than expected. Everything is a competition with boys, so they counted the number of plums they got trying to get the most and I think they got near to one hundred!
I froze bags of them (for the harsh German winter to come!) and kept some to make a tart from scratch. Once the sweet pastry is made, the filling takes minutes to prepare:
For the dough: mix 250g flour with 50g sugar, 125g butter, one egg and a bit of cold water if the texture is too crumbly. When you mix all the ingredient, don’t over work it, just leave it to rest at least for half an hour as soon as you manage to form a ball.
For the filling: Beat 2 or 3 eggs with 100g sugar and 200g crème fraîche (or single or double cream). Lay out the plums on the pastry and pour the creamy filling on top of the plums. Bake in the preheated oven at 180 degrees for about 30 minutes. Because my mold is made of silicon, I don’t bake the pastry first but you might have to do it if you have another type of mold.
Enjoy warm or cold!
What about you? Do you enjoy making a tart from scratch? What are your tips for the pastry?