Lemon Tarts

I wanted a balance with my chocolate tarts and decided to create this by making some lemon tarts. This recipe was from the book Muffins, Scones and Teatime Treats. 

I made the pastry the day before to give myself less to do, the recipe doesn't state this is necessary stating it requires only 20mins in the fridge. 

The pastry is made by combining plain flour, salt, butter, caster sugar, lemon rind, egg yolk and water together. Start with just crumbling the flour and butter and then add the remaining ingredients together. I then wrapped this in cling film and placed it in the fridge overnight along with the other varieties of pastry I'd made that day. 

Pastry wrapped and in the fridge.

When we were ready to start the following day I commisioned my mum to make the pastry cases while I made the filing. To do this she carefully rolled out the pastry and cut them using 8cm round cutters. This was the right size to fit in a cupcake tin, which is what we used to bake them. She found that the pastry easily made 24 cases, in fact we ended up making 30 due to having left over pastry and filling. 

The pastry cases were pricked with a folk and then baked for 10mins, unusually they did only require this length of time to bake and therefore the timing was correct. 

To make the filling I combined cream cheese, sugar and egg yolks together until smooth. I then added lemon juice and condensed milk beating this until the whole mixture was well combined. 

Smooth, light mixture ready to be spooned into cases.

I filled the cases by adding 2 teaspoons of mixture to each one and then these were baked in the oven. The recipe stated they should be baked for 5 mins but we started off with 10 and this seemed to be the perfect length of time. 

These were served on a 2 tiered cake stand.

Lemon tarts ready to be eaten

Verdict: I gave the tarts 7/10, I thought that the filling was really nice and light, however, it didn't taste strongly enough of lemon. The first taste I got was condensed milk and then the lingering after taste was lemon. I wanted to be hit a little more strongly. Gary also gave the tarts 7/10 stating that they were nice and refreshing, however, more lemon was needed. I also got my mum to guest mark these and she gave them 8/10 stating that they were creamy and smooth, her favourite so far but they were nothing special. Overall these tarts received a mark of 22/10, they were OK but definitely didn't create a wow. 

I have to apologise for the lack of pictures of this recipe, I forgot to take many as I was carrying out the various steps!! 

A Taster of the Week to Come

I haven't been able to do much baking recently because the Hyperemesis is still going strong, if anything it's worsened towards the end. However, in the week to come I will be doing a fair bit of baking in preparation for a family gathering under the guise of being a baby shower. I decided to just invite family but it gives all the ladies a chance to get to know each other better and share some chatter and laughter. 

Now I don't want to give too many things away at this stage, a bit of surprise is fun!! but I can give a smaller taster of what is to come. I will be spreading the posts out over a few days/weeks in order to not use all my material at once so you'll have to be patient with news on these ones. 

The plan is to create a traditional afternoon tea like one you'd get at a nice hotel or restaurant. My wonderful mother helped me achieve this look by purchasing some cakes stands for me. Most of these were purchased from BHS in the new year sale with a few additions from Hobbycraft, I believe.

So here is a selection of some of the stands that I got. I've kept this one boxed up for now but his is a lovely 2 tiered cake stand with gingerbread characters on it. 

2 Tiered Cake Stand

This is a larger single cake stand to display the whole cake on

Cream Cake Stand

 Finally this is a 3 tiered basket stand with some butterflies on the outside, this was a hobbycraft purchase. 

Butterfly Stand

We (me and my team of helpers) have organised our online shop to come on Tuesday, it's going to be quite a large shop full of goodies. As with all afternoon teas we are going to create some sandwiches, scones and cakes. No I'm not telling you any more than that but I can safely say that they'll be plenty of food and busy hive of activity here on Friday. 

Thanks to my Mother in Law we now have a table clothe for the table, completing the nice smart look we're going for. 

The rest of the baby shower won't be quite so classy as we have games planned like guess the flavour of baby food, guess my waist measurement and pin the dummy on the baby!! I hope that the reusable nappies will have arrived by then so we can all have a good study of them as well. 

So the countdown begins, this time next week hopefully people will start arriving ready to join in the fun and participate. Hopefully I'll survive the weekend and have some fun. I'll keep you posted... got a flat to clean now ready for my guests!!