Lemon Tart adventure

Whole Foods Lemon tart ingredients

On Thursdays, I get together with my friends to watch "So You Think You Can dance". It's a girls night, complete with dinner, dessert and a lot of shouting at the t.v. as we pretend to be judges.

A couple of Thursdays ago, my friend Vania bought a lemon tart from Whole foods. We had to stop the PVR to relish it. Janine claimed it was a slice of "lemon heaven". And it was. It was light, fruity, sweet and yet slightly tart. The crust was delicious too and I'm not a huge crust fan!

the Whole Foods lemon tart

So I made it my goal to try and recreate it. As soon as I got home, I googled "lemon tart whole foods recipe" and unfortunately, the *exact* recipe was not to be found although there was a whole foods berry tart recipe. Essentially what they said was to use a pre-baked pie shell and add lemon curd. The thing is, it tasted like there was cream in it and sure enough, further google searching found other recipes that did this.

I was heading down to the States that weekend so on our usual trip to Trader Joe's, I picked up pie pastry and lemon curd in anticipation of making it for the next SYTYCD night.

It has been a comedy of errors trying to make this tart but the short of it is that I wasn't able to make it in time of the next SYTYCD night but I was successful in making something that was similar. Here's what I did:

1. Whip 1 cup of whipping cream until it's thick
2. Add 1 jar of Trader Joe lemon curd and mix together
3. Pour into baked Trader Joe pie shell
4. Refrigerate and garnish with fruit

Yes, it's truly that easy. I let Nica lick the spoon from the lemon curd/whipped cream mixture and he loved it. Mom and Dad both praised the crust and they're really judgmental about pastry. I know it doesn't look that tasty in the photo but it was really good! Honest!

Next time I might actually attempt to make lemon curd and the time after that maybe I'll try my hand at pastry dough. We'll see!

Trader Joe's Lemon Curd: $2.99
Pretty good on its own, even better when mixed with whipped cream. Quite sweet with a tart finish. Strong lemon flavour. Imported from England. Would buy it again!

Trader Joe's Pie Crust: $3.99 for two.

Instructions

They give you two in the event you want to make a double crust pie. I thought it would come in a pie shell but it doesn't. You have to thaw and then put it in a plate yourself (which to be honest, is more environmentally friendly anyway). Very delicious. I would easily buy this pie shell again for future pies for its convenience and taste. I only forked the bottom of the pie before putting it into the oven to brown but I really should have pricked the sides as well. Failure to do this resulted in the sides puffing up. Still tasty... but definitely not pretty.