John Torode's berry and mascarpone tarts recipe
The key to their success is the combination of sharp yet sweet fruit and a whipped cream filling, and not being too precious about how they look. The pastry can be a bit wonky but the soft fruit is so pretty it doesn’t matter.
Recipes extracted from My Kind of Food by John Torode (Headline, £25) Photography © Yuki Sugiura
See John Torode appearing live at BBC Good Food Show Summer in the City, ExCel London, 20-22nd May 2016.
Ingredients
For the pastry- 500 g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
- 1 pinch of salt
- 250 g softened butter, cubed
- 4 egg yolks
- 50 ml water
- 300 g mascarpone
- 120 ml double cream
- 50 g caster sugar
- 1 vanilla pod, slit lengthways and seeds scraped out
- 2 small punnets of berries (raspberries and blackberries – or whatever is in season), washed
- 1 200g tin cherries in syrup, drained
Details
- Cuisine: British
- Recipe Type: British
- Difficulty: Medium
- Preparation Time: 30 mins
- Cooking Time: 17 mins
- Serves: 12
Step-by-step
- Heat the oven to 200°C/gas 6.
- To make the pastry, first sift the flour and salt onto a worktop.
- Make a well in the centre, add the butter and icing sugar and gently work them together with your fingertips.
- Add the egg yolks and gradually draw in the flour, adding drops of the water as you go, until a dough forms.
- Shape the dough into a ball, wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.
- On a lightly floured worktop, roll out the pastry and use a fluted cutter to cut out circles large enough to line the cups of a 12-hole jam tart tin (the cutter should be just a bit bigger than the size of a hole – normally about 6cm).
- Bake in the oven for 10–12 minutes – they’ll puff up in the centre.
- Take the tin out of the oven and push the centre down with a piece of baking paper, then put them back in the oven and bake for a further 5 minutes to cook the pastry completely.
- Turn the pastry cases out of their tins onto a wire rack and leave to cool.
- To fill and top the tarts, beat the mascarpone with the cream, sugar and vanilla seeds until fluffy.
Some more tart recipes to enjoy
Blackberry cottage tart recipe