Oh dear... Dairy Week!
It appears that dairy week is not a favourite of the contestants, and generally dairy is not my thing either (other than cheese - there's always room for cheese)! This weeks challenge was Maids of Honour tarts. I had heard of Maids of Honour on an episode of Jamie & Jimmy's Friday Night Feast, so they were not a complete unknown, however I cannot say that I have ever had the pleasure of eating a curd tart before.
So it turns out that I'm not great at heating milk, as between the milk looking like nothing was happening it over-boiled and managed to escape from the pan which smelt quite bad - hopefully I managed to top it up enough with some extra milk to compensate the amount spilled over the sides, hopefully it was enough!
The recipe for the lemon curd seemed easy enough, but it doesn't appear to make very much lemon curd at all. Hopefully I won't spill any of this one! As part of the recipe it calls for the the lemon curd to be sieved, but as my sieve was already employed for the curd cheese, so I had to use the tea strainer instead. That made the curd a bit more fiddly than it should have been, but needs must!
My pastry looked a bit scruffy to start with, but after the first couple of folds it did start to look a bit more like an rectangle. Instead of using cling film to wrap up the pastry I used my beeswax wrap as it can be reused. It seemed to work a treat. One thing that become clear as soon as I got my cutters out was that the pastry is not enough! I scaled down to a 9cm rather than a 10cm cutter, which did yield the right amount of pastry cases, however as they were a little smaller they did need some encouraging to fill the baking tin, which meant that the edges became a bit tattier than I had intended. But I'm sure it's better to have a tattier, better filled tart, than a neat but stingy offering.
Filling and baking the tarts was a fairly simple task, so all that was left was to figure out the decoration.
The Bake Off recipe did come with a download of a Tudor rose, but surely that's cheating?! I decided to got down the "snowflake" route when cutting the stencil for the flower, however this has its own quirks. After quickly realising that a Tudor rose has 5 petals, not 6, the decision was made that the flowers would be non-historically accurate for the sake of ease and speed. Voila - a six-petaled rose!
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