marco pierre white's lemon tart
Ingredients
For the tart case:
- 500 g plain flour
- 175 g icing sugar
- 250 g butter diced
- grated zest of 1 lemon
- grains from 1 vanilla pod
- 1½ eggs
- 50 g sieved icing sugar
For the lemon filling:
- 9 eggs
- 400 g caster sugar
- 5 lemons zest of 2 and juice of all 5
- 250 ml double cream
Instructions
For the pastry:
- Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Sieve the flour and icing sugar and rub in the butter.
- Mix in the lemon zest and vanilla seeds.
- Beat the eggs and add to the mix. Knead the mixture with fingers, then wrap in clingfilm and leave to rest for 30 minutes in the fridge.
- Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface to a size just large enough to fill the flan tin or ring to be used.
- Using either a greased flan ring on a greased baking sheet, or a greased flan tin with a removable base, fold the dough into it. Gently ease the dough into the corners of the tin, ensuring a good 1cm/2in overhang. Do not cut this off.
- Line the flan with greaseproof paper and fill with enough dry baking beans or lentils to ensure that the sides as well as the base are weighted. This helps give a good finished flan shape.
- Bake in the oven for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, remove the beans and greaseproof paper and trim the overhang from the flan. Return the flan to the oven for a further 10 minutes.
For the lemon filling:
- Whisk the eggs with the sugar and the lemon zest.
- Stir in the lemon juice and then fold in the cream. Remove any froth from the top of the mixture.
- Reduce the oven temperature to 120C.
- Pour the cold filling into the hot pastry (this ensures that the pastry case will be sealed and hold the filling) and bake for 30 minutes in the oven.
- Pre-heat a very hot grill.
- Sieve the icing sugar over the tart as soon as it comes out of the oven and then flash it briefly under the grill to caramelize the sugar.