Lemon Tart - Delicious but Sinful

You will have noticed that I don't do many sweet dishes – but here's an exception.  We had 4 Meyer lemons on our little tree in a pot and I wanted to do something special with them.  That was the whole crop this year, so it was a pretty pathetic effort.

Having been successful with a lemon curd  I thought I would give a lemon tart a go.

I followed a recipe I had in my collection of recipes.  Sorry I can't tell you where it came from but it did work.  The recipe called for making the pastry – but that was a step too far for me.  So I used frozen store bought sweet short crust pastry.

As you can see from the picture the quantity of filling wasn't enough for the size of pie dish that I had (I only have one!) and as a result the pastry above the filling over-cooked.  I tried to cut it off to make a nice photo but crumbs shot everywhere … sigh.

If/when I do it again I would trim the pastry down to the level of the filling (or even better make more filling).

So I greased the dish, put the pastry sheet in and trimmed round the top.  I pricked the bottom a few times with a fork and then put in baking beans on top of baking paper.  I baked it blind (that is with the beans in) for 15 minutes at 190 degrees C ( approx. 375 F), took the beans and kitchen paper out and gave it another 3 minutes.

While it was baking blind I prepared the filling – which was surprisingly easy to do.  The ingredients were:

3 eggs

¼ cup lemon juice (I sieved mine)

1 tablespoon grated lemon zest

½ cup caster sugar

¾ cup cream (double cream)

More lemon zest to garnish (this garnish didn't work that well for me – it was a bit wet and clumpy)

You just beat the eggs, lemon juice, zest and sugar until it is combined (I just used a stick blender).  Very lightly beat in the cream – by hand is best I think.  And you are done – just pour it into the pastry shell and bake it for 5 minutes at the original temperature and then reduced the temperature to 150 degrees C (300F) and cooked it for another 20 minutes at which stage the tart was lightly set.  It firms up further as it cools.

It was delicious but sinful.