TT - Orange Tart

This is a recipe I found when looking for things to do with marmalade. I tweaked it a bit – adjusted due to the lack of some ingredients and. Other things. Sorry it had nothing to do with biscuits or chocolate! April Fools!

Step One.
Put on some music. I have chosen the Mozart Requiem (right now it’s the Confutatis. Quite appropriate for baking!)

The Shell
1 ¼ cup unbleached all purpose flour.
1 Tb. Sugar
Pinch of salt (if your butter is unsalted – mine was salted so I left this out!)
10 Tb cold butter cut into small pieces.
1 Tsp. finely grated lemon zest (you may remember the last time I zested lemons – today I just used the boughton kind)

Mix the dry ingredients, then add the butter and mix thoroughly. Add no more than 3 tsp of water, one at a time, until the dought JUST holds together in clumps. Press the dough together into your pan, and refrigerate for half an hour. If you happen to have a fluted tart pan like the recipe calls for, good for you – use it. I used just a pie pan, and only raised the edges about halfway. Half pie. (1.57)

Set oven to 400 degrees. Use pastry weights or dry beans, or another smaller pan for about the first 15 minutes, til the edges are golden. (Yellow is gold, green is drab, red is carmine, blue is azure, and I can't remember the other one) After 15 minutes, take out the weights, reduce the heat to 375, and continue to bake until it is golden all over, another 15ish minutes.

While its cooling, Put on some tango music. I recommend Yo Yo Ma playing Piazzola. (Also, drink some green tea and spill it down your front. Cause that’s how we roll here) Also. Eat a grapefruit.

...and make the filling.

The Filling
You need:
3 Tb butter
2 cups milk
3 Tb cornstarch (I substituted 6 Tb flour - it worked just fine)
2 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. pure vanilla extract

Brown the butter in a saucepan, and then put it aside in a bowl. Nom!

In another bowl, whisk 1/4 cup of the milk with the cornstarch. Whisk in the eggs.
In a medium saucepan, bring the remaining 1 and 3/4 cups milk, the sugar, and salt to a boil over medium heat. Take the pan off the heat, whisk about 1/4 cup of the hot milk into the egg mixture, and then whisk the egg mixture into the hot milk. Return to medium heat and continue whisking until the filling boils and becomes very thick, 30 seconds to 1 minute. Off the heat, whisk in the brown butter and vanilla.

And to get the full effect of the Tasty Tuesday, you should completely skip reading these directions, mix everything together before realizing the egg-milk-heat-order of happenings, and then also realizing you only have one egg left, so you can't start over. So you run next door to borrow one from dear 90-year-old Marge, who assumed that you were the girl coming to cut her hair.
But then start over and do it right.

Spread the filling evenly in the tart shell and set aside at room temperature while you prepare the topping.

The Topping:
Put on the song “Lady Marmalade” and sing along to it.
Enough marmalade to spread over the top - about maybe a cup? I just scooped some.
Oranges. I had clementines. Way cuter. It’s not hard to make oranges look good. Just kinda start on the edge and make your way around to the middle. The most time consuming thing is just taking all the little peely white stuff off.
So, arrange the oranges starting outside and circling in.

Then, heat up the marmalade until it is liquidy. Strain the orange bits out of it, and then mix - they recommended Cointreau - all I had was honey bourbon. It sufficed.

  

Paint it over the oranges to give a glaze.
Refrigerate for an hour to let the filling set up. Yum.

Pretty!