Baked Raspberry Tart

I'm not very experienced with pastry, so I purposefully chose this detailed recipe for making a raspberry tart (for the first time). Even though I made some mistakes, I was able to overcome them and troubleshoot my way to a respectable dessert. This was prepared for an Easter potluck, so I didn't want to disappoint.

I bought a removeable bottom 11-inch tart pan years ago with the intent of making one of these beautiful tarts, with the detailed edge and fruit filling. It sat in the back of my bakewares shelf until I finally summoned up the nerve for the maiden voyage. The tart pastry crust in this recipe requires some painstaking attention. It is a pâte sucrée, as explained in the article, which is a combination of flour and confectioner's (powdered) sugar and butter. This made for a more sugar cookie-like crust.

I did not have a food processor to blend the cold butter into the dry components of the crust, so I resorted to the old fashioned pastry blender. It was a bit of a workout, but the crust ended up coming together quite nicely. I neglected to notice that the recipe called for a 9-inch tart pan (and mine was 11 inches in diameter), so I had to roll out the dough very thin. It was almost a disaster, since the cold dough will start to fall apart or melt when handled, and draping it over the pan was a bit tricky. Fortunately, you are allowed to press bits together to mend it and it is then par-baked before the filling is added. I also solved two other problems during this stage of the recipe. My tart pan wouldn't fit onto a standard cookie sheet, so I placed it on top an aerated pizza pan for par-baking. I also didn't have any pie weights, so I balled up aluminum foil and weighted them down with a CorningWare glass lid. This kept the crust from bubbling up unevenly.

To solve the dilemma of the bigger tart pan, I doubled the filling recipe and used almost all of it. Cooking time was the same as in the article and it turned out fine. For decoration and an extra burst of raspberry flavor, I heated together raspberry preserves and honey, poured them into a condiment squeeze bottle and decorated the top of the tart.

One cautionary note... this recipe may not, at first, taste overly sweet, but it is indeed rich. Perhaps the butter and cream and egg mask the sugar content, but after even a thin wedge you may want to stop, drop, and take a nap!