So…I want to make a fruit tart for valentine’s day. Liz and I are making it together, but it’s my idea, my initiative. Two elements can be made in advance, the pastry cream and the tart pastry dough. So, we decided to make those tonight.
I’m positive we botched both of them, lol. I just have no idea what I’m doing, so even following directions to a tee, I still fuck stuff up all over the place because I have no foundation of skills. Like…our pastry cream isn’t going to set. It’s just not, I know it’s not. It’s way, waaaayyy too thin. And looking it up, it’s because I didn’t keep it hot enough through the mixing process, so the corn starch never activated and did its thing to thicken it all up. Sigh. But, the recipe said “simmer,” so we just kept it at a simmer, even though in the accompanying video, the chef kept it almost boiling. And then the crust…didn’t catch that the recipe calls for a food processor to cut in the butter. We tried to pivot to cutting in the butter by hand, but kids…there’s no fuuuuuucking way I was able to get that butter cut up finely enough for this type of pastry dough, and in the meantime—a good fifteen minutes of trying—that butter just softens the fuck up which it’s not supposed to do at all. Butter needs to stay cold. So, I have a dough, but I have no faith it’s going to make a decent pastry crust.
Disaster on both fronts.
But here’s my silver lining: I can try again tomorrow! I honestly think I know what to do with the pastry cream, and I think all we need to make the pastry dough right is to actually use a food processor. Liz put an APB out among our friends to see if we can borrow one.
Sigh.
Certainly a ton more effort than just going out and buying a fruit tart, but you know what? That’s not the point. The point is that I want to make something with my own two hands, and pick up some skills along the way. I don’t know how to do any of this shit. The only way to change that is to roll up my sleeves, make some mistakes, and figure it out. So, here we are. Figuring it out.
Night night 🙂