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Having friends over gives me an excuse to bake dessert.  Bags of lemons were on sale so I decided to bake a lemon tart.  I hadn’t tried lemon curd with chocolate before so decided to bake my chocolate pate sucrée for this tart.  Since the curd recipe leaves me with 4 egg whites I decided to make Bravetart’s marshmallow meringue to top the tart and then torch the meringue for a nice finish.  The eggs were farm fresh free run chicken eggs from our friend’s country home, so most of the yolks were such a beautiful orangey yellow, it was almost a shame to cover the curd with meringue!

The lemon curd is nice and sharp without being to sweet.  The curd goes extremely well with the chocolate pastry.  I reduced the sugar in the meringue because I always find meringue too sweet, this meringue was good.

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For the pastry - pate sucrée

75g icing sugar
250g plain flour 
125g butter
1 large egg, beaten (plus 1 large egg white, depending on consistency)

Cocoa powder variant - add 4.5 tbsp cocoa powder 31 g

Pinch of salt and 1 tsp vanilla 

Put the icing sugar, flour and butter into a food processor and blitz to breadcrumbs. Continue to blitz, and gradually add the whole egg until the dough comes together. You can check to see if it is hydrated enough by carefully picking a small amount up and compressing it to see if it forms a cohesive dough, if it does not, you may need to add a little of the egg white. Form the dough into a little round, cover with clingfilm and rest in the freezer for 10 minutes.

Roll the dough out to 12” diameter between two sheets of parchment paper (keep one for later).  If cracks form during rolling, just dab a bit of water on the cracks and bring the edge back together.  Remove the top parchment paper and transfer to the tart pan.  Gently press the dough into the pan ensuring that it goes into every nook and cranny.  Avoid stretching the dough as that leads to excessive shrinkage during baking.  If there are cracks just use excess dough that is above the pan edge to fill the crack smoothing it out quickly with your fingers trying not to melt the butter.  Dock the dough.

Chill it for 30 minutes in the freezer, this helps avoid shrinkage. Pre-heat your oven to 350F (180C) while the tart dough is chilling in the freezer.  Once the oven is ready line the top of the crust with foil or parchment paper and place pie weights or dried beans to keep the pie crust from puffing when baking.

Bake the pâte sucrée for 20 minutes. Carefully remove the parchment paper filled with weights and bake for 15 more minutes, until the edges of the crust are golden.  (I needed an additional 5 mins so bake for 20 mins once the pie weights are removed)

Set the tart shell aside to cool (still in the dish). Leave your oven on at 350F/180C.  Since we’re adding a partially cooked filling, the tart shell doesn’t need to be fully cooled.

In the meantime, make the lemon filling.

Grab a fine-mesh strainer before you start and have it ready within arm’s reach.

For the lemon filling :

1 cup (250ml) lemon juice (about 4 lg lemons)

Zest of 2.5 lemons (organic lemons)

3/4 cup (150g) sugar

1/4 tsp salt

¾ cup (170g) unsalted butter, cubed.

4 large eggs + 4 large egg yolks

In a medium saucepan (no heat yet), whisk together the lemon juice, lemon zest, sugar, salt, egg yolks and eggs. Add the cubed butter and turn the heat to medium. Whisk slowly until the butter is all melted. Continue whisking steadily until the mixture thickens to a thin custard consistency.  This took about 20 mins.

Immediately pass the lemon filling through the fine mesh strainer, directly into the tart shell. You may require a third hand to help get all the curd out of the pot into the strainer.  Gently tap the tart on the counter a couple of times to eliminate air bubbles.  Using an offset spatula (or back of a large spoon), smooth out the top of the filling. Bake the tart for 5-6 minutes, until the filling has slightly set and turned slightly deeper in color.

Set aside to cool for at least 30 minutes. Enjoy slightly warm or chilled.

Marshmallow Meringue

halve the ingredients to use the 4 egg yolks left over from the lemon curd.

1 cup | 8 ounces egg whites, from about 8 large eggs

1¾ cups | 12 ounces sugar or Roasted Sugar (page 102)

Consider reducing sugar as the meringue is very sweet.

½ teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt (half as much if iodized)

¼ teaspoon cream of tartar

¼ teaspoon rose water, or seeds from 1 vanilla bean (optional)

Key Point: With gently simmering water, the meringue should cook fairly fast. If you find the temperature climbing too slowly, simply crank up the heat.

Fill a 3-quart pot with 1½-inches of water and place over medium-low heat, with a ring of crumpled foil set in the middle to act as a booster seat. In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine egg whites, sugar, salt, cream of tartar, and rose water or vanilla bean (if using). Place over steamy water, stirring and scraping constantly with a flexible spatula until thin, foamy, and 175°F on a digital thermometer, about 10 minutes. Transfer to a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment and whip on high until glossy, thick, and quadrupled in volume, about 5 minutes. Use immediately.

Pipe on to the lemon curd, then using torch, burn the meringue.

My index of bakes. 

In the late 1800's, a lot of immigrants from Slovenia and Croatia came to this part of the world to work in the mines.  They brought some of their food influences too.  A local restaurant/bakery makes potica (pronounced Po-TEET-Sah), which is a Slovenian sweet bread with filling.  The most common filling is ground walnuts, and like many foods, each family has their own recipe.  This bread has been on my bake list for a few months now.  I have a friend from Slovenia, and recently, her mother was gracious enough to share their family recipe with me.  Hope I did it justice!  It's a wonderful recipe that introduced some baking elements I haven't used much and this one challenged me a bit. When I first tasted it, my first thought was that it needed cinnamon.  But the more I ate, the simple flavor grew on me and I think something like cinnamon would take away from the walnut. Next time, I think I'd add either a small preferment or less yeast and a longer ferment to develop a little more dough flavor.  Overall, a very fun bake!

The first challenge: holy butter!  I'm sure there are breads that use more than this but I was really doubting that she had copied the recipe correctly when I was looking through the ingredients.  38% butter was well beyond anything I've tried.  Combined with that EIGHT egg yolks.  Thought there was no way this would come together with only AP flour, but I was wrong.  In the end, the dough came together nicely.  I don't think I kneaded it quite enough early on and the dough was a little fragile when rolling, but it rose really well and ended up giving a nice open crumb.  Maybe thanks to the 4% active dry yeast!  :-)  On top of that, it also had 50% scalded whole milk, which is one of my favorite parts of making an enriched dough.  For some reason, I just like the smell of scalded milk and think it adds nice flavor to a dough.

The second challenge...  I didn't have a pan the size the recipe called for, so I had to estimate how much dough was needed for my 8.5" x 4.5" pans.  The remaining dough I formed into buns.  I overestimated a bit and should have made a couple more buns.  My pans were overflowing!  :-)

The third challenge...  Instead of adding the egg whites to the walnuts incrementally, I added the walnuts to the egg whites.  It was too much and made a very soupy filling.  In hind sight, I should have ground some more walnuts.  It did thicken up a bit as it sat, but never got to spreadable paste.  It made forming the rolls and handling them a little tough.  Kind of like a very limp noodle.  :-)

Despite all that, very happy with the result for the first attempt!

Makes 3 loaves for a 8.5" x 4.5" bread pan.  Alternatively, makes two loaves and approximately 5 buns.

Yeast Mixture
300g   Whole Milk, scalded at 180 deg F
32g     Sugar
24g     Active Dry Yeast

Dry Dough Ingredients
600g   All Purpose Flour (I used King Arthur's at 11.7% protein)
3g      Sea Salt

Wet Dough Ingredients
225g   Unsalted Butter, softened to room temperature
30g     Sugar
~144g  Egg Yolk (8 large eggs)
4g       Vanilla Extract (1 tsp)

Filling
500g   Walnut, ground to meal
300g   Sugar
~260g  Egg White (8 large eggs from above) 

1)  Scald milk by heating to 180 deg F and let cool on counter to room temp.
2)  Cream butter and sugar until fluffy using paddle attachment in a stand mixer. Add egg yolks and vanilla extract.  Mix and medium speed.  The mixture took on a look and texture that reminded me of scrambled eggs.  Wasn't expecting that!
3)  Combine yeast mixture ingredients and let proof for 5-10 minutes
4)  Combine dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl and make a well in the center.
5)  When the yeast mixture is proofed, add the butter/yolk mixture to the yeast mixture and stir to mix.  Pour the combined mixture into the flour well.
6)  Slowly stir in the flour.  Continue stirring until all the flour is wetted.  Cover and let rest for 15 minutes.
7)  Perform 4 sets of bowl kneading with 10 minute rests between sets.
8)  Place in a oiled bowl and let double in size.
9)  While bulk is rising, beat egg whites at high speed until fluffy and firm.  Combine Filling sugar with walnuts and stir to combine.  Slowly add egg whites and rum to the walnuts until a thin paste forms.
10) After dough doubles, punch it down and divide the dough into the desired number of loaves and buns.  For the buns, use about 110g of dough weight.
11) Roll dough out about 16" long and wide enough for dough to be 1-2 mm thick.
12) Divide filling based on number of loaves and buns.  When dough is rolled out, evenly spread the allocated filling on the dough and tightly roll into a log.  For the buns, put the seem side down and then coil the log.
13) Cover the dough with a cloth and let proof in a warm area for at least 1 hour.
14) Preheat oven to 350 deg F
15) When dough is proofed, poke a bunch of small holes into the dough using a bamboo shish kabob skewer
16) Bake loaves for 1 hour and buns (on a sheet pan) for 25 minutes

"scrambled eggs" during mix