My classmate Vivien is putting the final touch on her Strawberry Pistachio Tart. The other tarts were done by my tablemates, Wendy and Randy, and Vivien’s tablemate, Michele. This is just the beginning!

Okay, here they are, the pictures I promised… a few weeks later, well more like a month.

When I arrived home Shaun and Kris saw the array of mini mousse cakes I made in SF and we switched to mousse cakes for the wedding. So it’s been wild and crazy trying to order the forms and ingredients and work out the recipes and decorations. Plus I’m putting in work experience hours writing web content for The Berry Man, a local produce distributor, so I have spent my writing hours on that… up until today.

This is a pistachio cream tart. It’s a pistachio pastry cream on the bottom with fresh strawberries and sugared pistachios on top. The pastry for this tart was made the night before and allowed to rest. It’s very rich. Then we cut out fairly thick circles of pastry and put them into 7″ cake pans to bake. The sides of the tart actually rose up as it baked to form a perfect tart shell… well, my second one was perfect. I got a little carried away with the pastry sheeter so my first one was unsatisfactory. This one I rolled out with a rolling pin to exactly the correct thickness. Trust me, it was delicous. This one didn’t make it home to Santa Barbara. 

“Get it all out and display it,” said Brian as he walked away. This is just a portion of what we had ready to take home on Friday.

Here we are looking a bit worn, but pleased with our results.

I’m quite excited about this next week, where we will be making even more complex finished pastries. Keep watching the blog for new photos.