The Delectable Delight

It’s strawberry season, and no doubt, you too, have noticed the abundance in the supermarkets/grocers. In our household we have been devouring punnets continuously and strawberries never usually last long enough to be cooked.

I wouldn’t really call myself a baker, but the sight of our flan tin the other day followed quickly by a fridgeful of strawberries quickly inspired me to bake a tart!

Making the pastry – Go Foodprocessor!

Made from flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and lemon zest combined with egg and cream, this pastry had to sit in the fridge for 4 hours before it was hard enough to roll out.

Tart shell filled with strawberries

A great thing about this recipe was that the shell didn’t need to be blind baked :) Here it is, filled with 2 punnets of strawberries.

Just before getting into the oven

I used a 20cm tart tin which was the perfect size – the custard only just reached the top.

Ready to eat!

I think I may have left it a smidge longer in the oven than I was told to, but it didn’t matter, the tart was still delicious! I was very impressed by the pastry, which was rich but had a lovely lemony tang to it, simply divine. I’d definitely cook this again – if I don’t eat all the strawberries myself first!

Sensing Mid Autumn Festival’s arrival and hence the beginning of the end of mooncake season, Daisy Moo and I went on a frantic mooncake mission through Chinatown to secure our boxes of mooncake goodness.

Now you may think that getting mooncakes would be a simple transaction: enter shop, purchase goods, leave shop; but let me tell you otherwise. The numerous brands…the endless flavours….the swarms of people hoarding over the same box…it can be a hard day’s work lol.

This year, we managed to get a hold of a reasonable array of flavours, from a few different brands, some we’ve never even tried before.

For those who’ve never seen a traditional mooncake, it’s a square, or sometimes rectangular, or round ‘cake’ that’s actually a block of lotus seed paste covered in pastry. You can also get them with salted duck yolks inside. Yes, I understand that may sound weird, but believe me when I say they are delicious:) They’re usually served cut into little wedges and conveniently, there’s always a plastic knife inside the box when you buy them.

Long ago, the only flavour you could get was lotus seed paste, but now you can choose from a huge range of modern type flavours. We saw durian, black sesame, white lotus, pandan flavoured lotus and taro on our travels this year. Being in Australia, I’m sure this would only be a limited range of what’s actually produced in Asia – I’d love to see what flavours are on offer in Hong Kong/Malaysia/China during this time of year!