Two for tarts and lessons learned

My mission this weekend was to make up for the lack of posts during the past week with something spectacular.  The ‘something spectacular’ turned out to be a couple of tarts, the recipes of which I had had my eye on for a little while.  Now that I have an actual tart pan (as well as some mini tart pans) I decided to get busy in the BR kitchen and see if they’d taste as good as they sounded.

The short answer is that they did, but there’s more to the story than that.  This past week was taken up with tasks other than creating lovey baked goods and taking pretty pictures of them.  School started this past week and a few evenings were spent making sure that my stepson was set to start 8th grade by buying school supplies, getting his backpack organized, etc.  Also, I bought a shelving unit from IKEA and stained and put it together – another evening gone.  By the time this weekend rolled around, I was ready to bake up a storm and get another blog post up.

Saturday morning, I got up bright and early and started in after a cup of tea.  I had prepared a couple of tart doughs on Friday evening for baking in the morning, so after rolling them out and putting them in a hot 400-degree oven, I realized with horror that the cookbook had misguided me.  I found that out only after I took the shells out and saw that they were completely burned and inedible. 400 degrees is way too hot for a tart shell!  I lowered the temperature to 350 and did the next round (after mixing and waiting two hours for them to firm up in the fridge) 12 minutes with the weights and another 12 to finish them.  Duly noted for the next time I bake a tart.  I ended up spending about nine hours in the kitchen to make two measly (but delicious) tarts – it’s a good thing I’m not really in the business of selling my baked goods to customers.  I’d have a lot of angry customers on my hands.

Lesson learned: this blog is purely a source of pleasure for me and I shouldn’t feel pressured to make up for a busy week by trying to create something spectacular on the weekend.  I love looking at food blogs and seeing how they’ve presented and photographed their food.  I take a lot of inspiration from them all.  I’m using this blog to work on my own food photography and I should tell myself the next time I think of getting too ambitious that most of these bloggers do only that and have all the time in the world to prepare and photograph food.  A lot of my time is already spoken for and Bakery Rebellion is a hobby.  It will continue to be a source of pleasure, not stress.

My new goal: post once on the weekend and if there’s time, post once during the week.  I think that’s reasonable considering all the preparation that has to go into each post.

Thanks for reading!

07 Sep This entry was published on September 7, 2014 at 7:20 pm. It’s filed under Baking, Food photography, Pastry, Uncategorized and tagged baking, blue cheese, candied orange peel, custard, Italian desserts, orange, pastry, pears, Spanish desserts, tarts. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.