Tuesdays with Dorie: La Palette's Strawberry Tart

This week's selection for TWD came from Marie of A Year in Oak Cottage. I love strawberries and this tart looked delicious and not too involved. However, my first problem was trying to find a tart pan with a removable bottom. I looked at Target even though I knew they probably wouldn't have such a thing and of course they didn't. But I also went to Williams & Sonoma thinking surely they would have one - they did not. I found one on their website but not in the store. So I though about either making the crust in the springform pan or in the tart pan/plate I already have that had no removable parts. I decided to go with the tart pan.

The crust was fairly simple to make. My food processor is small though and was not big enough to mix the crust in, so I used my big blender, it has a lot of different settings on it so I though that was the next best thing. It did okay, the big problem I had was that the butter got stuck in the 'well' of the blender bottom. So I still ended up having to take the crust mix out and mixing it together by hand, which makes me believe I mixed it too much. It tastes great, it's just very crumbly and did not hold its shape when I tried to spread the jam on it.

I didn't have any of the suggest liquors for mixing in with the berries but I did have some Triple Sec so I threw in a little bit of that as well as a little sugar. I used some homemade strawberry jam I bought at the herb festival I went to a few weeks ago, it was very good. In the book Dorie suggest using creme fraiche on top of the tart but I already had some heavy cream on hand so I made whipped cream. All in all it was a tasty dessert, my presentation was lacking and my pictures aren't stellar but the tart was another winner.

Next week's selection will be the Peppermint Cream Puff Ring, chosen by Caroline of A Consuming Passion.