Today is my son’s 14th birthday. It’s amazing how quickly time flies when you’re a parent! It seems both like yesterday and forever ago that I went into labour for the first time. What a journey it’s been!
For his birthday, I let him choose from pictures of a few desserts I was thinking of trying. He chose the Blackberry Lime Tart with Dark Chocolate and Almond Crust from Christina of Baking with Chickens, who I follow on Instagram.
Since I haven’t altered the recipe in any way, I’m going to do more of a recipe review post. If you would like the recipe, you can get it from the Baking with Chickens site here.
There were a few things that drew me to this recipe. First, it looked beautiful in her post on Instagram, with the purple-red colour of the filling against the chocolate crust. Second, I don’t cook with blackberries much, and the flavour sounded interesting.
The recipe itself is fairly simple. She uses a pate sablée crust, which comes together relatively easily, but she gives you the option of doing an even easier version with crushed sandwich cookies and butter. The filling is a combination of cooked blackberry puree with lime and honey, sweetened condensed milk and whipped cream. You can leave the tart at that and decorate with fresh blackberries, but if you want to go a step further, you can make some mini lemon flavoured meringue cookies with the egg white that is left over from making the crust. Of course, I did the extra step! Meringues are so easy to make, why not do it?
She coloured her meringue cookies, so I decided to try that too. To achieve this I painted lines of gel food colouring on the inside of my piping back before adding the meringue. When they pipe out, the food colouring sticks to the meringue, for a very pretty look. They turned out pretty well! I think I made them a bit too big, when comparing with the picture from her recipe, but overall, I was happy with the look and they tasted really nice, with the added lemon flavour. The did crack a bit during baking, but it almost gives them a fresco look 🙂
I decided to try something a bit different for decoration than she did, although I used the same components of blackberries, meringues, zest and small wedges of lemon and lime. She did a straight line across the middle of the tart and I decided to try forming them in a crescent shape.
The verdict on this tart is that I would definitely make it again. The flavour is reminiscent of Key Lime pie, with something extra from the blackberries. The chocolate crust contrasted nicely with the blackberry flavour. Because of the gelatine in the filling it cut really nicely too!
It is so pretty and doesn’t take much active time to make. I hope you try it too!
Wow, that is so impressive. My styling never looks as good. I love making meringues so will give that a try. And birthday blessings for your son 🙂
Thanks Tandy!