mix, mix…stir, stir

After a run of excellent results in the weekly baking group, Tuesdays with Dorie, this week’s recipe fell a little short for me. It is definitely tart and lemony, but maybe just a little too tart for my taste buds. The filling is made with the whole darn lemon!

The entire lemon, peel and all, is processed to a smooth batter with likely companions; sugar, eggs, cream and butter. I am not a big fan of orange marmalade because of the bitter peel flavor, and that is what I picked up with this filling which I think is what made it not so appealing to me. I will admit that I did add my own little twist to the recipe by infusing the cream with fresh thyme. The thyme added a very subtle herby note that I thought played nicely against the lemon flavor, but the lemon flavor was a bit too bitter for me.

The recipe specified 1 ½ lemons, which I felt was a bit ambiguous and I would have preferred to have had a weight to provide some standardization.  My lemons were small so I used two of them, which may have actually been too much. I don’t know.

The other issue I had with this recipe was the mess it made when baking. The recipe warns the filling will bubble up and quite likely flow over the sides of the tart pan, so I baked the tart on a sheet pan to catch any overrun and it’s good I did. The tart does not look pretty right out of the oven with filling overflowing and burning onto the sheet pan below. The complicating factor with the overflow is the tart is essentially seared to the top edge of the tart pan making it rather challenging to release. If the taste had been out of this world, I would happily overlook the mess, but I think this will just be one, of very few recipes in the book, that I probably won’t make again. I suspect anyone who loves marmalade will go nuts for this tart, so if that’s you, you should visit Barb of Babette Feasts for the recipe and give it a try. You can also see the results and opinions of the other bakers by visiting the Tuesdays with Dorie blog roll. The crust for the tart, however, was excellent!

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 73 recipes completed 148 to go!