Strawberry Tart

Cook Time 1 hour + resting and cooling

Servings 6-8

Ingredients

Pastry
200g plain flour
100g cold chopped butter
20g caster sugar
Cold water to bind together
A pinch of salt

Custard
500ml milk
3 egg yolks
80g sugar
30g corn flour
1 vanilla pod
200ml cream (whipped)
2 punnets (500g) of fresh strawberries, stalk removed and washed and halved if required.
2 tbsp of strawberry jam or fruit jelly

Method

Put all the dry ingredients in a mixer and mix. Now add the butter and blitz until it looks like crumble. Add a little water at a time until it forms a ball.
Knead a few times and rest the dough in the fridge for 1 hour.

Roll out the dough about 3mm thick to fill a 26cm greased tart pan. Pierce the dough with a fork a few times.Place a sheet of baking paper in over the pastry and line with rice or beans to blind bake the tart. Bake for 15 minutes at 180°C. Remove the beans and bake for a further 5 minutes. Let it cool.

Slice open and scrape the seeds from the vanilla pod and add the lot to the milk, bring the milk to the boil gently so the vanilla is well infused. Beat the yolks and the sugar together until whitish in colour add the cornflour and mix well until smooth. Remove the vanilla pod from the milk and pour the boiling milk in the egg mixture whisking vigorously. Place the mixture back into the saucepan and bring to the boil stirring continuously with with a wooden spoon until it thickens. Place the custard in a bowl with a plastic film covering it (it must touch the custard so it prevents the formation of a thick skin).
Let it cool. When cool, gently fold in the whipped cream.

Fill the tart shell with the custard and arrange the strawberries on top of the custard. In a small saucepan (or in the microwave) heat the jam with a tablespoon of water and cook for a few minutes. Brush the strawberries with this syrup to give them a beautiful shine.