Apricot, White Chocolate & Lemon Curd Tart aka “the Brian Tart”

The idea here is to create a kind of lemon curd filling that sets on cooking, encasing the apricots and melted white chocolate. The lemon juice and zest help keep things from veering off in an overly saccharine direction.

For a 23cm tart tin with a removable base:

Ingredients

Filling

250g fresh, or 225g dried apricots, chopped roughly

225g best white chocolate. Please do not use inferior quality chocolate – the tart chemistry simply won’t work. Roughly chopped. I have often used the white Toblerone bar

4 eggs

110g sugar

110g melted butter

Juice and zest of 2 lemons

Pastry

350g plain flour

225g butter 82%

110g sugar.

How To

1. To make the pastry, rub the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs, then stir in the caster sugar. If you have a food procesor or mixer then either blend or use a K beater – I have used both methods and the hand method. By hand is a bit more “stony” (as pictured) , with a mixer will give you a fine sandy, crumbly affair
2. press the mixture into the tin by hand, line with crunched up baking paper and either ceramic baking beans or salt or rice ie “baking blind” bake in an oven preheated to 180°C until solid – approx 12 minutes.
3. Remove the baking beans (or salt/rice) and for a perfect baked blind case paint the base with an egg yolk and re-bake a further 2-3 minutes

3. Place the chopped apricots and chocolate into the tart case.

4. Mix together the eggs, sugar, melted butter, lemon juice and zest. Pour into the tart case. Cook at 160C for 25 minutes. Allow to cool before serving.

Improvs and Ideas

There is talk of a peach version…. I think it would work well. Me…I am mulling over a version where the apricots are first macerated in amaretto

There is a prune and dark chocolate version and I do recall a party buffet once where I made both.

As a tip….. there is a risk the curd filling splits in the cooking or doesn’t set – I often stir it with a fork during cooking but it is a bit of a faff. Cooking the filling first as if it was a lemon curd, until creamy consistency, pouring over the filling should work and I may try next time I make.