Tarting It Up!

I’ve been eyeing this recipe for a mango and lemon grass tart forever. The luscious, gleaming mango slices adorning the tart always has me drooling while flipping through the magazine the recipe’s featured in. So when we found ourselves a whole box of incredibly sweet Thai mangoes, i couldn’t resist stealing two to make the tart for a function my mum was hosting.

The tart came together fairly easily without much of a fuss. Seeing as how my tart doughs have a tendency to shrink while baking, i made the edges of the tart about half an inch higher than the pan to allow for that shrinkage. Surprisingly, the dough didn’t shrink at all in the oven so my tart came out of the oven gorgeously golden, crisp and with nice and high sides.

So the components were made and assembled and i put it all in the fridge, making sure to remind my mum just a few hundred times that there was a tart sitting around waiting to be eaten, and left for a house party with an eggnog cheesecake in hand. To be perfectly honest, given the amount of food we were serving, i really wasn’t expecting anyone to touch the tart at all- plus i would have been more than happy to have that tart all to myself.

So imagine my surprise when i came home, peered into the fridge and saw just a slice of the tart- just enough for a taste- left.

From that slice i had for lunch the following day, this tart truly was more than a sum of its parts with the tropical flavours and textures of the components of the tart complementing one another perfectly.

Sidenote- here’s wishing you one and all a happy new year! May the new year bring you love, joy, peace and good health!

Mango & Lemongrass Tart with Coconut Pastry [adapted from delicious Dec '07/ Jan '08 issue]

Ingredients
300ml thickened cream
3 lemongrass stems, outer leaves removed and lightly smashed
3 egg yolks
1/3 cup caster sugar
1 tsp gelatine powder
2 mangoes, peeled and thinly sliced

Coconut Pastry
1 1/3 cup plain flour
100g chilled unsalted butter, chopped
3 tbsp cold water
1/3 cup desiccated coconut
Icing sugar, to dust

1. Put the lemongrass and thickened cream in a saucepan. Bring the cream to just below boiling point then remove the pan from heat and let the lemongrass steep for an hour at room temperature.
2. To make coconut pastry Whisk the flour and desiccated coconut together. Using your fingertips, rub the chilled butter pieces into the flour mixtur. Pour the cold water into the mixture and mix well until a dough comes together. Wrap the dough in cling wrap and let it sit in the fridge for 30 minutes.
3. Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to about 2mm thick and line the base of a greased tart pan. Chill the tart base for 20 minutes.
4. Preheat the oven to 180C. Line the base of the tart pan with baking paper and uncooked rice and bake for 10 minutes. Remove the rice and the baking paper and bake for another 5 minutes or until the pastry is crisp and dry. Remove from oven to cool completely.
5. Beat the yolks and sugar together til thick and pale. Add the cream in, discarding the lemongrass stems and heat the mixture on low heat until the mixture thickens slightly, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir the gelatin powder in. Cool the mixture completely and pour it into the cooled tart pan.
6. Chill for 2-3 hours until firm and top with overlapping mango slices. Dust with icing sugar and tinge the edges with a blowtorch.