Strawberry Mascarpone Tart

Here's a little story of how one recipe fail led to a delicious recipe success.

For Mother's Day I made this chocolate cake, minus all the dried fruit and nuts.  

My mom is a big chocolate lover so I thought it would be perfect.  

Unfortunately instead of looking like this...

It looked like this...

About half the size, burnt, and dry.  Not really what I had in mind.  

Maybe I didn't fold in the egg whites right.  

Maybe my mom's oven was too hot.  

Maybe it just wasn't meant to be.

It was time to move on to something better.  

I had a big tub of mascarpone cheese leftover from the cake recipe, 

and strawberries practically overflowing from the grocery store.  

So I did a search for a mascarpone strawberry tart 

and came up with this recipe from Simply Recipes.  

Looks so summery and pretty, right?

It started with a couple pounds of beautiful strawberries...

That were sliced and mixed with sugar and orange zest in a big bowl 

and allowed to rest for 30 minutes.

Next, mix the mascarpone cheese, powdered sugar, orange zest, lemon juice, and vanilla.  

Cover and put in the fridge for later.

After the strawberries have sat for 1/2 hour, drain them over a sieve into a bowl.  

Put the liquid into a saucepan with some balsamic vinegar, and reduce down to a syrup. 

Let cool.

Now, you may notice that I haven't talked about making the pastry shell.  

Yeah...there's a reason for that.  

I had decided to use the puff pastry method described in the recipe 

because I wasn't confident I could make a good pie crust.  

But I couldn't get the pastry rolled out to a big enough size.  

And I really wanted to use my new tart pan.  

So I ended up using a store bought pie crust.  

Can you forgive me?  Please?  Good.

Let's put together our tart.

Take your baked pie crust and fill it with the mascarpone cheese mixture.  

Arrange the strawberries on top in a pretty fashion.  

Brush the balsamic syrup over the top.

Put on a pretty cake stand, take a few pictures, then dig in and enjoy!

The lesson of this story?  

When life serves you burnt, dry, cake 

toss it in the trash and whip up a delicious strawberry tart instead!