gracewoo@ml

food: blueberries, strawberries and rhubarb custard tarts

One of my favorite fruits as a kid was rhubarb. Basically, one of my good friends in my neighborhood grew rhubarb during the summer time and her mom would chop off a stalk for me to take home whenever I went over. I don't know why but I really liked to freeze the stalk of rhubarb and then dip it in a bowl of pure cane sugar to eat it up.

Anyway, it's 4th of July and since we're going to be doing a picnic and fireworks later, I decided to be a little more adventurous and try making some fruit custard dessert. Szym and I picked up a great deal of fruit earlier in the day from Haymarket so we had a whole lot of cherries, strawberries, blueberries, rhubarb and limes.

Ingredients:

For cocoa crust:

1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup confection sugar
2-1/4 cup flour
2 tbsp cocoa
1 tbsp almond syrup
cupcake paper cups - recipe makes about 24 cups

Chop up butter into small pieces and fold in salt, sugar, cocoa and syrup. Mix using fork or hands and slowly add in all flour until one big ball. Put in fridge for at least an hour. I decided to make cupcake rounds so take out crust and press thinly into the paper cups. Bake these empty cups at 350 deg. for 30 minutes and let them cool completely.

For rhubarb compote:

4 cups chopped 1in rhubarb (about 4 stalks)
1/2 cup sugar (you can always add more if you want)
1/2 cup water

Put everything together and bring to a boil. When the rhubarb starts falling apart keep mixing and continue to cook on medium until the water is boiled off and the compote begins to thicken. Turn off heat and let compote cool off. You can store this in a tupperware for other uses as well.

For custard (enough for 6 cups):

2 egg yolks
1/4 cup sugar (I ended up using more like a 3/16 of a cup since my rhubarb turned a little sweet)
1/4 cup flour
1 cup full-fat whole milk
2 tbsp almond syrup

Whisk the eggs yolks together with sugar and flour. Bring the cup whole milk to a boil and immediately begin pouring into mixture. Then return whole mixture to stovetop and cook on low until custard is creamy and sticks to the spoon. Turn off heat and let it cool completely, the custard will thicken a bit upon cooling.

Putting it all together:

Spoon two spoonfuls of custard into each crust. Top with a thin layer of rhubarb compote and set berries pretty into the base. I used a bit of mint (another thing I always felt goes really well with rhubarb) as garnish and if you like one can heat up some apricot jame to brush on to the fruit and give it a good glaze.

Edit: After serving these to a bunch of people, I found that having just the custard on it's own with rhubarb compote and fruit is also great tasting although perhaps not as pretty.

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