Baking Bouchon - Recipe 87: Lemon Meringue Tarts

Don't get mad but I totally cheated.  The impending move is making me crazy!  I am completely obsessed with emptying my pantry before we move and it means I've been eating the weirdest foods.  The other day I ate rice mixed with a piece of cheese and a cut up hot dog for dinner.  It was strangely good.  I've also been forcing myself to eat these packets of Cream of Wheat that I bought and I hate.  I thought it would be an alternative than my typical work breakfast of oatmeal.  It's disgusting, but I keep eating it.  My friend makes fun of me because she says that what I'm forcing myself to eat costs approximately $0.50 and I spend way more than that on my daily coffee.

My cheating here consisted of using a jar of Lemon Curd for these Lemon Meringue Tarts instead of making my own.  I've made the lime version of the curd in the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook and it's amazing so I'm sure that the lemon version is also amazing, but I couldn't make lemon curd when I had a jar sitting in my cupboard.  I just couldn't.

The base of the tart is Pâte Sucreé which I've made a few times and is a pretty easy sugar cookie recipe.  The tarts don't get baked again once they're filled so the shells need to be fully baked when they're empty.  I was supposed to use these special individual tart shells, but I reused the English Muffins molds I recently bought which I thought was genius.  Plus, they worked perfectly so it pretty much was genius.

There are 3 layers of goodness inside of these tarts.

1. Madeleine Cake - a lemon cake that I've made before but this time the batter is spread really thin in a baking sheet so the cake is super skinny.  After it's baked it's cut into circles that fit in the bottom of the baked tart shell.
2. Lemon Curd - my fraudulent curd is the next layer inside the tart
3. Meringue - standard meringue is piped on top - egg whites whipped with a hot sugar syrup until it's nice and fluffy.

I'm pretty disappointed in myself because this was my opportunity to buy a blow torch and I didn't do it.  The recipe says to use a little kitchen torch to brown the meringue on the top of the tart.  CA says that I can't be trusted with a blow torch which is probably true given that I've set myself on fire before, but I really want to caramelize sugar and meringue with a blow torch.  It's so much more fun that putting it under the broiler in the oven.  BORING!

Overall these are pretty awesome.  I wish they had been a little bit more tart - but they probably would have been if I'd made my own curd.  Whatever - I knocked out a Bouchon recipe AND got rid of a random pantry item.  My obsession trumps everything.

Enjoy!
Julie