Welcome to Kaprise Kitchen!

To kick off this new shiny blog, here are the makings for Strawberry Key Lime Tart. I used red, ripe strawberries and these adorable little key limes. The key limes make me smile, they are these tight little ping pong ball limes with the tartest puckery flavor. And I love them! Plus, they keep relatively well in my refrigerator, which is always a plus.

For the crust: I like to contrast the sweet and tart filling of this tart with a flaky and slightly salty shortbread. Obviously, if the salty/sweet thing is not your cup of tea, feel free to omit the salt from the recipe and add a pinch more sugar to have a sweeter shortbread crust.

• 1 stick (8 tbl) of unsalted butter, melted
• 1/4 cup of sugar (you can use brown sugar for a dense crust, I used organic cane sugar)
• 1 cup of all purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp of flaky Kosher salt

For the filling: I really love the natural sweetness and tartness of the fruit in this tart, so I use less sugar than the average recipe. If you dislike tart desserts… dial the sugar up a few tablespoons

• 2 large eggs (the size of your eggs is important, jumbo eggs will give you a looser filling, so you will have to add more of the other ingredients for this to work properly)
• 3/4 cup of sugar
• 1/2 cup of lime juice
• 2 tablespoons of flour, sifted
• lime zest (if I can’t find organic and spray free fruit, I don’t add the zest because it normally contains the highest concentration of pesticides

Instructions (with picture guidance)

Melt the butter in a small pan, make sure not to burn or boil the butter. You just want it to be melted. (I might have very quietly added this pretty little pan to my box of things when I moved out of my parent’s house.)

In a bowl, stir together the ingredients for the crust. Flour, sugar, salt.

Add the melted butter to the dry ingredients and stir until you get a soft and pliable dough.

At this point you need to determine if you should add more flour or not. Sometimes my dough is too sticky and I’ll add a tablespoon or two more flour to make the dough less sticky. If the dough is oily, add more. But, your dough should look something like this:

Gather the dough into a ball at the bottom of the bowl, and put it in the refrigerator while you prepare the pan. Cover a 9 inch round pan in foil. (Remember, dull side up).

Remove your dough from the refrigerator and pat it neatly into the bottom of the pan.

Set your oven to 350 F and let the crust bake until it is lightly browned, about 20 minutes. You can see that I set my timer for 25 minutes and my crust was a little too crisp. (I don’t preheat my oven because I really never remember to until the last minute, and I recently saw a commercial that told me pre-heating wastes energy.)

Now! While your crust was happily baking away, you should get the filling made. Quickly soap and scrub out your bowl and flip it to dry while you zest and juice the limes.

Remember, if your fruit is organic and spray/pesticide free, you should zest the limes before squeezing for juice. It’s easier to zest whole limes than chopped/squeezed ones. I was lucky enough to find these little organic and low pesticide limes, so I zested away. I used about 1 tablespoon of zest. (See my cute little citrus Microplane? Don’t ever buy it. That little bugger’s handle broke off 4 months after I bought it.  Thumbs down.)

Now, take your naked little limes, chop them in half and squeeze them into a glass. (I actually have a Pyrex measuring cup that would have been super helpful in this exercise, but I didn’t use it.) Key limes have a lot of seeds, so you will need to either pick them out with your fingers or strain the juice through a mesh sieve. I didn’t want to use my fingers and I don’t own a sieve, so I flipped my (currently handle-less) Microplane over and poured the juice through that to catch the seeds. Obviously, I am simultaneously writing this blog and buying a mesh sieve online.

Now, mix together all of the filling ingredients (sans the strawberries). Make sure the eggs and flour are beaten in well so that your final filling sets smoothly.

Chop your strawberries. I de-stemmed and cut them to show the pretty insides and sprinkled a little lime juice on them.

At this point, your crust should be sitting on your counter. Reduce the oven temperature to 300 F. Pour the filling into the pan, and neatly arrange the strawberries on top of the filling. (You want to make sure that you don’t overwhelm the tart lime filling with the sweet strawberries, and be mindful that adding too many strawberries will make your filling too loose).

Bake at 300 F for 20 minutes, or until the center is set. And when it comes out of the oven, it should be shiny, beautiful and utterly mouthwatering. (I realize this picture doesn’t look much different than the one before, but I promise it is the fully baked tart, and you will be able to see the difference when you make it!)

Let the tart cool in the pan. Or you can be super impatient like I was and try to take it out of your non-spring form pan (also buying one of those right now!) and then realize that a 300 degree tart is really really hot. And PLOP it on your floor.

And even though you were terribly upset and mildly burnt from this tart, you lick your fingers and realize it was DELICIOUS. Plus… it helps when your munchkin hears the WHOMP and runs over with her toy, promptly dropping said toy, licking up the tart frantically…. and then begging for more.

So. Happy Inaugural Recipe!

❤

Kaprise Kitchen!