The Art of Two Tarts » Pies

Mini Strawberry Rhubarb Galettes

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:59:09 +0000

You may remember us telling you how our dad’s favorite dessert is strawberry rhubarb pie back in April. It’s his all-time favorite, but we don’t make it too often because everyone else in our family isn’t too keen on it.

Well, with it being father’s day this past Sunday, we knew that we HAD to make our dad another strawberry rhubarb dessert. We didn’t want to make the same old strawberry rhubarb pie we always make for our dad. Instead, we thought it would be nice to make mini galettes. We really like individual desserts and they seem to be really popular lately.

We’ve made this peach blueberry crostata plenty of times and we absolutely love the crust. We knew we wanted to use it for our mini galettes. It’s so simple to make and always comes out perfect!

These truly were delicious! Now we know why are dad is in love with anything strawberry rhubarb. There’s something about that sweetness from the strawberries and the tartness from the rhubarb that creates such a wonderful combination.

Of course we made some with peaches and blueberries for those picky eaters in our family.

You gotta have a few in the crowd!

We’re so lucky to have such a great father in our life. He’s done so much for our family and truly is an amazing person. He’s great to go to for advice. The man seriously knows the right answer to anything! It’s good knowing that we have someone like him to call our father!

There just aren’t men like him these days.

Here’s the recipe:

For the Crust

Makes 12 individual servings

Adapted from Ina Garten

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup granulated or superfine sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 pound (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, diced
6 tablespoons (3 ounces) ice water

Place the flour, sugar, and salt in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Pulse a few times to combine. Add the butter and toss quickly (and carefully!) with your fingers to coat each cube of butter with the flour. Pulse 12 to 15 times, or until the butter is the size of peas.

With the motor running, add the ice water all at once through the feed tube. Keep hitting the pulse button to combine, but stop the machine just before the dough comes together.

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured board, roll it into a ball, cut in half, and form into 2 flat disks. Wrap the disks in plastic and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

For the Strawberry Rhubarb Filling

Adapted from Cooking with Amy

1 1/2 cups rhubarb, peeled and sliced in 1/4 inch pieces
1/2 cup strawberries, sliced
1/2 cup sugar
2 Tablespoons cornstarch

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Combine the rhubarb, strawberries, sugar and cornstarch. Let sit for 15 minutes, no longer. Meanwhile break each disk into six pieces and roll each one into roughly a six inch round. Place 1/4 cup filling into the center of the dough rounds and fold the edges over, pinching to seal, place galettes on a baking sheet.

Bake for about 20 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool slightly and serve.

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

admin — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 14:00:26 +0000

Being the “bakers” of the family, we get many requests from family members for their favorite desserts. Usually each member has a few that they like, but our dad only has one. Every year, when April comes a long, our dad requests that we make this pie. He LOVES his fruit! (He does own grocery stores with a focus on fresh produce! ) Strawberry Rhubarb Pie is his all time FAVORITE! It had been several weeks that he kept reminding us that it was rhubarb season! Lisa, being the wonderful daughter she is, found some time to bake not 1 but 2 pies for the family.

Many people stray away from this pie because they aren’t familiar with rhubarb. There’s nothing to fear about this colorful-celery-like-vegetable. Even though it is a vegetable, it has a sweet and tart flavor. It’s delicious! We’ve never had it in another recipe, but we can tell you that it goes wonderfully with the strawberries in this pie.

The pie was still really warm when Lisa took the picture so the filling didn’t set yet.

When we had it after dinner it was still slightly warm and the filling set beautifully!

This is our favorite crust recipe!

All Butter Pie Crust

Ingredients

Taken from PieceofCakeBlog

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon to 2 tablespoons sugar (see note)
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt (or 1/4 teaspoon table salt)
1 cup (2 sticks) very cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
6 to 8 tablespoons ice water

Directions

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. Pulse a few times to blend. Sprinkle the butter pieces over the dry ingredients. Pulse until the butter is the size of large peas.

Add 6 tablespoons of the water and pulse until the dough just begins to form a ball (you may need to add up to 2 tablespoons more of the ice water). Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and gather it into a ball. Divide the dough in half, and gently pat each half into a disc. Wrap each disc tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before rolling.

After you roll out the crust and place it in the desired pan, let it chill for 15-30 minutes in the refrigerator before baking to prevent shrinking.

Strawberry Rhubarb Filling

Adapted from Simply Recipes

Ingredients

3 cups rhubarb stalks cut into 1/2 inch pieces (Trim outside stringy layer of large rhubarb stalks; make sure to trim away any and discard of the leaves which are poisonous; trim ends.)

1 cup strawberries, stemmed and sliced

1 cup sugar

3 Tablespoons of quick cooking tapioca

1/4 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of grated orange peel

1 Tablespoon of fresh orange Juice

Directions

Preheat oven to 400°F. Mix the rhubarb and the strawberries with the sugar, tapioca, salt, and orange rind. Let sit for 10 minutes.

Turn into a pastry lined pan. Top with the pastry, trim the edge, and crimp the top and bottom edges together. Cut slits in the top for the steam to escape.

Bake at 400°F for 20 minutes, reduce heat to 350°F, and bake an additional 30-40 minutes longer (40 to 50 minutes longer if doing a 10-inch pie). Cool on a rack.

Serve warm or cold. If you do cool to room temperature, the juices will have more time to thicken.

TWD: Banana Cream Pie

admin — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:49:00 +0000

This weeks Tuesday’s with Dorie’s (TWD) recipe was chosen by Amy of Sing for your Supper. Amy chose Banana Cream pie as you can see! This was our 3rd TWD recipe and we’ve liked all of them so far. We’ve had Banana Cream pie in the past, but we’ve never made it on our own. We’ve made many different kinds of pie, but never Banana. We made this on Friday after work and we couldn’t eat it until Sunday early morning. You see, we gave up sweets for lent… and the only day we can have sweets in on Sunday… We’ve been suprised on how well we’ve been doing! We never thought we could bake stuff and half to wait 1-2 days to eat it!! The pie was delicious! Everyone in the house liked it. Our brother Carmine LOVED it and said “I’ve never had banana cream pie this good!”

We suggest that you buy Dorie’s book if you don’t already have it. Trust us when we say, you’ll LOVE it!

You can find the recipe on Amy’s blog here.

The recipe was really simple to make. I think it took us less than 2 hours to do everything! It’s a basic pastry cream, made with brown sugar instead of white sugar, with just a hint of cinnamon and nutmeg in it. Once you have the crust and filling ready all you do is bake the crust and let it cool, then layer it with pastry cream and bananas, and then top with fresh whipped cream. Dorie adds a touch of sour cream to the whipped cream and we thought that was a great idea! We liked the flavor a lot! We couldn’t get any decent pictures of a pie slice… so sorry! We’re working on perfecting our picture and blog layout! hang in there with us! =)

This weekend was crazy for us because on top of this pie we had to bake TWO birthday cakes! Here are some pictures.

This was for our niece Priscilla’s 3rd birthday. She wanted a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cake!

It was a chocolate cake with a nutella and mascarpone whipped cream! YUMMY!

The second was for our Brother Dominic. We kept it pretty simple.

This was a lemon chiffon cake with a lemon curd filling.