Like I said, I am obsessed with mini desserts right now. It works well. Hubs and I are only two people after all. I don't need to make an entire giant dessert so that we can spend a week eating it, or worse, eat it all in one night and spend the next 5 days over-exercising to feel better about it.
A little while back, I was inspired by Joy the Baker's Fig Apricot & Marscapone Tart. She makes this GIANT tart in a 9-inch pan... ok, now that I'm thinking about it, that's not THAT big, but she scared me by calling for 8-12 figs in her recipe. So, true to form, I cut her recipe into quarters and picked up 4 figs from my mom's tree on my way home from work. I didn't have any apricots, but I did have nectarines. Those would work, right? ...YES!
My MIL got me these cute little tartlet pans as a shower present last year. They're amazing. I don't have a lot of reasons to use tiny tart pans, but I am finding them and it is magical. The weekend she gave them to me, I made us each our own tiny cheesecake. Awesome.
Ohyeah, so Joy the Baker's recipe uses corn meal in the tart crust. I am so jealous that I hadn't thought of this before. I love cornbread, so why wouldn't I also love incorporating its main ingredient into pie crust? Duh.
Kind of sad thing - my fridge froze the marscapone post just-for-fun tiramisu, which I never blogged about but probably should have. Maybe I will make some more so I can
Thawing it out was no big, but once cheese freezes, it does this weird curdling thing. It's not ruined, but its not as pretty and it doesn't have the lovely smooth texture that you want. You can kind of see above how its kind of grainy.
NO MATTER. I sharpened a tiny knife and sliced up ONE fig for these two tartlets. I thought I might need two, but I needed ONE; one fig. Good thing I didn't get more.
Figs are weird looking. I grew up in a family of fig lovers. Folks who carried them around and chomped into them like squishy apples. I thought their tentacle-like insides were going to eat my face. I steered clear. Grown up Alyssa still thinks they look like alien sea monsters, but they're delicious, so I eat them anyway... on occasion... usually reduced with sugar and rolled up into a pinwheel cookie.
Something about the cornmeal and the marscapone and the fruit combination makes this tart completely amazing. It's savory, which is baffling - despite adding a ton of honey to the cheese mixture and all that sweet fruit on top. I would truly love to eat one of these tartlets for breakfast. Too bad there aren't any left.
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