My greengrocer had beautiful local raspberries when I made these recently. You could use frozen raspberries, but watch the amount of liquid; you will need to reduce it down. Or make a lemon filling (see note).
Use whatever size tart tins you have, use smaller tins if you wish to make more tarts, or cut out pastry into thin rounds, cook as you would shortbread biscuits and sandwich together with the filling. Any excess pastry can be formed into a ball and rolled out again.
Ingredients
| 250 g | Sweet shortcrust pastry, I used Paneton, pre-rolled sweet shortcrust |
| 2 punnets | Raspberries, 120g each (Main) |
| ¼ cup | Caster sugar, plus extra for dusting |
| 1 | Lemon, freshly zested, plus 1 Tbsp lemon juice |
| 1 cup | Ricotta cheese, about 2 Tbsp per tart (Main) |
| 5 drops | Vanilla extract |
| 1 serving | Icing sugar, for dusting |
Directions
- Heat the oven to 190C. You will need 8 tart tins (8cm x 2cm deep), and a shallow baking tray.
- Roll the sweet pastry a little thinner than usual, then using the rim of the tart tins, cut out the pastry to fit into each tin. (This will give you shallow tart cases once baked. Alternatively, you could use a cutter slightly larger than surface of the tins to cut out rounds). Place pastry rounds in the tins and using a piece of excess pastry rolled into a small ball, press pastry into tins. With a fork, prick the bases a couple of times.
- To bake blind, cut out small pieces of baking paper to cover pastry, then fill with rice. Place on the shallow baking tray and place in the refrigerator to firm up for at least 10 minutes. Remove from the refrigerator and bake for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and carefully remove the rice, then the baking paper and return to the oven to dry out for 3-4 minutes, but watch they don't colour too much. Remove from oven and leave to cool a little and firm up before removing tart cases from their tins.
- Place 200g raspberries in a small saucepan with the sugar and lemon juice. Bring to a simmer and cook until raspberries begin to collapse. Remove raspberries and cook juices until syrupy. Return raspberries to juice and leave to cool.
- Place ricotta in a bowl with the grated lemon rind and vanilla extract. Gently stir through the remaining 40g raspberries, breaking them up a little as you stir.
- To serve, place half of the cooked raspberry mixture in the base of each tart, dollop over the ricotta mixture then top with remaining raspberry mixture. Dust with icing sugar before serving for added sweetness.
Lemon filling
Make up a quantity of thick lemon curd to replace the raspberry mixture (refer to my recipe onbite.co.nz). Mix about ¼ cup chopped candied peel through the ricotta with lemon rind and vanilla extract.
tip
Check out Ray McVinnie's video on'How to make chocolate shards'