You prepared a wonderful dinner party. Guests are wowed by the appetizer and the entree. And now you are ready to serve the tart.

Oh, a big-round-tart topped with most beautiful berries.

But the stress is up. Do I have to cut it?!

The moment a knife landed on the tart, berries got smashed, the flaky crust broke at unwanted places, you ended up with, sort of, a wedge. You served that to a guest and hoped that the taste can make up for the visual mess.

This is exactly what happened to me last time. Maybe a little exaggerated. That’s why I’m planning to serve individual sized tarts next time. Another advantage is everyone gets the same size (so no siblings fight over who gets a bigger piece). And you can even make different flavors at once, or just decorate the tarts differently, that’s a lot of fun. So I set out to convert my Pâte Sucrée (Sweet dough) recipe for a 9-inch tart to fit into six of these 4-inch pans.

Making the dough

This is a recipe you can definitely make by hand. But since I like the modern commodity so I used a food processor. You can either use a steel blade or a plastic blade if your food processor comes with one. Measure flour, salt, and sugar directly into your food processor’s working bowl. I’ve also attached the ingredient quantity in gram in the recipe below. If you use a kitchen scale, don’t forget to zero between each measurement.

In a bowl of a food processor, pulse a couple of times to aerate and blend together dry ingredients. Add small pieces of cold butter into the bowl, pulse 10 to 15 times until it resembles coarse meal. Blend egg, 2 tablespoons of cream and vanilla extract in a small bowl. Turn your food processor on, pour the liquid in all at once. Immediately turn the machine off. Grab a handful of the mixture, squeeze it to see if it can stick together. If not, add 1 tbsp more of cream. The last step is to form the mixture into a ball. This step can be achieved by continuing pulsing the machine until ball forms. But I find it’s very easy to over process the dough, then it becomes very sticky to handle. To avoid this, you can process this last step by hand: pour all the mixture onto a lightly floured working surface (or a big flat piece of plastic wrap), use your hand to gather the mixture and form a ball.

If you decide to make it all by hand: Measure flour, salt, and sugar into a large bowl and mix well, rub the butter pieces into dry ingredients with the tips of your fingers until the pieces of butter resemble the size of oatmeal flakes. Do not over mix, we don’t want the butter to melt in our warm hands. Whisk egg, cream and vanilla extract together in a small bowl and add it to the dry mixture, use your hand to combine everything and form a ball.

One thing I cannot insist enough is: don’t overwork the dough, otherwise it will become too sticky to handle and the baked tart shell won’t be as tender.

Now press down the dough ball into a 6-inch round disk, wrap tightly in plastic wrap and let it rest in the refrigerator for an hour. Do not skip this step. Since during this time, the dough will further hydrate and become easier to handle. So it will less likely to crack while you roll it out.

Shape the tarts

After an hour, take the dough out and roll them into an 8-inch log, cut the log in half, then divide each half into 3 equal pieces. By weight, it’s about 90 gram of dough for one 4-inch tart pan. Form a ball with each piece of dough and press down into a tart pan, push the sides up until meeting the edge of the pan. Then you can use a 1/2 cup measure cup to flatter the bottom of tart shell and to push against the sides.

Use a fork to light poke the bottom of tart shells (like I did in the photo below), this will help steam to escape during baking and prevent pastry from puffing up. I also like to freeze the shell for at least 15 minutes and it proved to be very effective against tart shrinking during baking. You can make it ahead and leave the tart shells with baking pans in the freezer for up to 2 months until you are ready to bake. In this case, wrap each tart-in-pan tightly in plastic wrap to avoid it drying out or taking off-odor of a freezer. You do not need to defrost them before baking.

Baking

Heat the oven to 375Fº/190cº. Cover tart shell with pie weight and bake for 20-25 minutes, then remove pie weight and bake 10 minutes more. After baking, wait at least 5 minutes before removing tarts from pans. If you are using good non-stick baking pans, you can leave them until they are completely cooled.

Prepare the filling

While tart shells are cooling, we can now prepare Mascarpone whipped cream. I prefer Mascarpone than cream cheese because it is less tangy and more creamy. Whip Mascarpone cheese with half of sugar using an electric mixer until it doubles its volume. Whip heavy cream with the rest of sugar and vanilla extract in another bowl until a soft peak form. Using a wire whisk, mix 1/3 of heavy cream into whipped mascarpone cheese to lighten it up, then using a spatula to fold the rest of cream in. Try not to deflate too much. Mascarpone whipped cream is very versatile, you can use it the same way as whipped cream, it adds a richer flavor and make cream very stable. It is so stable that you can even use it to frost a cake instead of buttercream. It makes a perfect alternative with less fat but tastes as good.

Now you can use your own imagination to assemble these tarts. You can smear cream into shells, you can pipe it into nice swirls, you can top with whatever fruit that is in the season. These little tarts are super cute and I’m sure you will wow your guests next time you serve these. Or like me, you can avoid a sibling dispute by offering one to each (I’m not sure about that yet. One of these tarts is too big for a 5 years old, don’t you think?)

I hope you get a chance to try making these, or even better, create your own variations and show me the result by tagging #simpleindeedtaste on Instagram.

Feel free to ask a question or leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

Happy cooking,

Qi