Shop Boy's Journey of Culinary Expansion: Tangy Lemon Tart

With the birth of my beautiful nephew, I decided that I should always take some sort of cake, slice or meal for my brother and sister-in-law whenever I visit.

I figure it makes their lives that little bit easier…and it’s hard to refuse a visitor that is bearing baked goods so I would get a lot of face time with my nephew. I’m a genius.

For the first visit I opted for a tart.

I thought this was a good idea as they would be dealing with an influx of visitors and I had an overwhelmingly large amount of lemons and thought a tart was a nice way to use them.

Not having a lemon tart recipe that I favoured I decided to hit the Internet and find a recipe that jumped out at me.

After a ten-minute search I found it, the perfect recipe. Tangy Lemon Tart from The Australian Women’s Weekly online. It used a large quantity of lemons and advertised itself as being tangy. I was happy.

It looked to be a very simple recipe and I decided to make it quickly the night before our journey down to see my family. I think that was a fatal mistake.

A quickly made tart is not a happy tart.

While the process of making the pastry and the filling were simple, it was the construction of the tart and getting it into the oven that I struggled with. Badly.

I think that with cooking when you make a mistake you either rectify it immediately, or it snowballs creating more and more disasters. I’ll let you guess what happened to my tart.

My first mistake was not getting out a rolling pin to flatten the pastry. I decided it was quicker and easier to just spread it with the palm of my hands directly into the pan. While this was a quicker process, it set the shaky foundations for the dish as a whole.

My next faux pas was not using baking weights…again to save time. Needless to say, the blind baking was a bit of a disaster and cracks were formed which led to my next issue. I decided that the cracks would repair themselves when I poured the filling into the pastry and I would just have a lemon swirl around the edges of some pieces.

Oh how wrong I was.

Did you know that when a liquid is poured onto something with cracks it leaks out of said cracks? Crazy concept isn’t it! Instead of filling the cracks like a bit of Selley’s All Clear the mixture leaked under the pastry and I was left with a strange upside down lemon tart sandwich that, while tasting delicious, was very strange looking.

I would like to apologise to all who work in the Women’s Weekly test kitchen and promise to do better work with your recipes in the future.

Let this be a lesson to you all; don’t cut corners.