Coconut Cream Tart

I broke down and bought some little 4″ tart pans. I shall be making all sorts of little tarts in the near future. For now, all I’ve made is this little coconut cream tart.

It’s made with my now standard coconut cream pie recipe which involves a homemade crust made from crushed oatmeal, chocolate, and coconut cookies. The crust is topped with a thin layer of chocolate ganache and the ganache is topped with a vanilla coconut custard and the custard is topped with lots of whipped cream which is topped by toasted coconut.

The pie we made for Easter had some serious whipped cream issues. We used a recipe for non-weepy whipped cream from Baking Illustrated. I’d made this recipe just the week before for the whipped cream part of the Black Forest cake I made. It turned out fine. When we made it for the coconut cream pie, it weeped and ran and so forth. We whipped it again and put it on ice for its trip across the state…the plan was to top the pie with the whipped cream once we got to Harrisonburg. Guess what? Yeah, the stupid whipped cream was runny again. So we whipped it again and apologized to everyone for the runny whipped cream on the pie. No one seemed to mind as it tasted good.

So, the next day I experimented with the tart pictured here. I wanted to take pictures of it and runny whipped cream would not do. So I whipped more cream and this time I added a touch of unflavored (and dissolved) gelatin to it. The trick worked and I have now conquered the weepy whipped cream. The whipped cream on this tart was still pretty solid several days later. Hooray!!

We went camping in the Outer Banks yesterday. It was a little cold and a little bit rainy but still fine. I was a bit whiny early in the day because my allergies were acting up and my eyes were itchy…but I found some Visine at a convenience store and the day got better. We used the boyfriend’s new tent (see here for our last camping misadventure) and it was fantastic. It was easy to set up, it didn’t collapse and it kept the rain away from us. What more could we want out of a camping trip? Oh, yeah…a hot shower. We got that as well as we stayed at a private campground with hot water.

We built a fire at the campsite and grilled Italian sausages for dinner. The boyfriend was amazed to learn that I was a Girl Scout for years and knew how to build a blazing fire. He kind of accused me of lying about being a Girl Scout and I could have sworn it was something I’d mentioned in the past. I guess not.

To top it all off, we made S’mores with Nutella for dessert last night…the recipe for these was found in the grilling cookbook Alison gave me for Christmas. They were delicious and much superior to using a Hershey’s bar for the chocolate as there were no unmelted chocolate pieces in the S’more. While eating these, I decided that I’m going to attempt to make a S’mores pie or tart this week. I’ll post details if I succeed.

In other news, I’m pretty excited about a picture of the chocolate and peanut buttercream cupcakes I posted on Flickr. I posted the picture to the Slashfood group and it became their Food Porn Daily picture of the day on the Slashfood website on Thursday (March 27th). Pretty cool, huh? I knew this was something that could happen because all of the pictures posted to the Slashfood group will be considered…I just didn’t actually think one of my pictures would be chosen.

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