Melting lime cream tartelettes

Summer it was. Long-long days, generous amounts of sunlight and light salads that were just dying to be followed by something sweet. That was the moment for fetching a cool lime cream tartelette. Just to discover, after having begun eating it by small bites, that one crumbly half of it has to be swallen by whole. And as these bites were starting to become an addiction, I decided to send the recipe to the Estonian food magazine Oma Maitse. Voila! I got a prize for it in October. Why are the tartelettes 'melting'? As I unfortunately discovered, it's mission impossible to take them to friends in summer - gelatin tends to do nasty tricks (Although the taste won't be damaged for the bravest of friends). But with the kind of weather we're having now - ready! set! go!


The picture featured in the magazine didn't however have such bright yellow cream, probably because the cooking team didn't use the eggs of happy home-grown hens (that's the reason why every Estonian should have a homestead).

Using the same recipe, it's possible to make tiny one-bite sweets or bigger tartelettes. The smaller, the better, I'd say: more flavour in every bite and room in the belly for more:) It's really easy to use ready-made tartelettes, or bake your own in a muffin pan or in metallic moulds. For filling 300 g ready-made tartelettes I used about 2/3 of the creme.


Lime cream tartelettes

3 eggs
3 yolks
200 g butter
180 g sugar
1 dl lime juice
vanilla
sour juice (i.e. redcurrant)
gelatin
cherries/raspberries/morellos
tartelettes (cooled if made at home)

1. Melt butter in a saucepan. Whisk in sugar, lime juice, eggs, yolks and vanilla. Whisk over medium heat until the cream thickens (about 10 minutes).
2. Pour the warm cream into tartelettes and let them cool for at least an hour.
3. Now the jelly. You can add water to the juice if you like (I don't - the more taste, the better). Soak a proper amount of gelatin in it, heat the juice to dissolve it and let it cool a bit.
4. Place some berries onto the cream and pour the juice onto the tartelettes. Let cool.

Sour-sweet-crumbly-creamy-juicy tartelettes are often even better to eat with a cup of tea than a slice of cake. It's a simple pleasure, enjoying them while they're slowly crumbling between your fingers.
It's quite odd that when I went to fetch my prize (vegetable oil-juices-margarines) in the rather end of October, some of the margarines had already reached their expiry date. Fortunately it's the only bad thing I can say about the magazine. Still, it would have been polite to at least inform me of the need to receive them as soon as possible. Having won something, one doesn't want to whine, but something like that doesn't lighten the mood very much.