Seasonal Cooking - Fig Tart

On arrival back home after nearly three weeks away on our Summer Holiday up North I set off to do some grocery shopping and came home with copious amounts of Fruit.

In summer the kids basically live in the pool and feast on Mangoes,Bananas,Watermelon & lots of stone fruits. 

To my surprise the fruit shop also had lots of locally grown boxes of Figs at a great price, I tend to think of Figs as an Autumn fruit... I looked it up and I was very surprised to see Figs had two seasons of produce a year. 

One in Autumn and one in late Summer.

You learn something new every day...

anyway

I love figs

Savoury or sweet and they always photograph beautifully!

We have been living off them (40 in the box)and the last of the figs started to ripen quickly.

Sydney has been a strange one in the last few days or so with its weather.

 Our second day home (Friday) saw the hottest recorded weather in Sydney's history!

The inside of our house was 40c at one stage.

Thankfully that evening a lovely cool southerly change came through.

which meant come saturday I could bake and use up the last of the ripening figs.

Fig Tart Recipe 

Set a fan forced oven at 170c

Short Crust pastry

I have used a very high quality store bought shortcrust pastry that I try to always have in my freezer. In this tart I used a combination of two flavours.

1 sheet of Dark Chocolate short crust pastry

1/2 a sheet of Vanilla bean sweet short crust pastry

prepare and cook the pastry shell to store bought (or your own recipe) instructions.

I used the dark chocolate short crust on the base and the vanilla short crust on the sides (refer to picture below)

Tart Filling

1 cup hazelnut meal

300g double thick cream

1/2 cup plain flour

6 table spoons brown sugar

2 tsp vanilla paste

3 teaspoons *fig Vino Cotto

mix all the above ingredients together in a bowl until it forms a paste. Spoon into the prepared tart shell and spread out evenly.

*instead of Vino Cotto you could use any liquids from water to a liquor such as Frangelico.

13 Figs

wash and cut the figs in half and place on top of tart filling, pushing down slightly.

Bake in a fan forced oven at 170c for 45 minutes or until the filling is set and browned (make sure to turn the tart for even browning). Take the tart out of the oven and let it cool before serving.

Serve with a dollop of vanilla bean ice cream 

I unfortunately didn't get a chance to take a proper picture of the finished result as the tart was taken straight from the oven to a friends house :)

here is my average Instagram photo below.

Happy Baking 

Xx Siobhan