Dr. Science and I schlepped four pies to his office today for Pi(e) Day (Observed). This is the one that’s most connected to the occasion:
pi(e) (a)r(e) square(d)
The tart shell is King Arthur Flour’s Citrus-Scented Tart Dough; the shell is filled with pastry cream and topped with fresh fruit laid out by color in the order of the spectrum. Here’s the recipe:
Roll out the dough to fit a 9″x9″ tart pan. Fit the dough into the pan, weight the dough, and bake at 375℉ for 20 minutes. Remove the weights and return the shell to the oven to bake for another 5 minutes. Cool the crust in the tart pan on a cooling rack. Remove the crust from the pan.
Pastry Cream
(paraphrased from Friberg 2002)
1 pint whole milk
½ vanilla bean or ½ t vanilla extract
1 oz cornstarch
4 oz granulated sugar
¼ t salt
2 eggs
2 oz unsalted butter
Scrape the vanilla bean into the milk and bring the milk to the boil. Whisk the dry ingredients together in a bowl, add the eggs, and mix until smooth. Slowly add about a third of the milk to the egg mixture, whisking rapidly. Return the tempered egg mixture to the saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture returns to the boil and thickens. (If you’re using vanilla extract instead of vanilla bean, add it now.) Stir in the butter. Put plastic wrap over the surface of the pastry cream to keep a skin from forming. Refrigerate.
When the pastry cream is cool, spoon it into the tart shell, smoothing it with an offset spatula.
Top with fresh fruit of your choice; mine was strawberries and raspberries (red), clementine suprêmes (orange), banana slices (yellow), kiwi slices (green), blueberries (blue), and blackberries (violet).
References
Friberg, Bo: Pastry cream. In The Professional Pastry Chef. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002, p 845.
King Arthur Flour: Citrus-Scented Tart Dough. http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/citrus-scented-tart-dough-recipe
