Petite Treats: Orange and Lavender Tart

Well…I had to fight for this one. This orange lavender tart was a slightly more complicated recipe than my last adventure with tarts – but I think I made it through! This recipe comes from Food52 – so head on over there for the details and directions! It’s a perfect tart for March as it marries orangey wintertime flavors with floral lavender accents that make you think of Spring.

Here are some baking discoveries that I made during the process – many of these may sound very basic, but if you’re a new baker like me, they are not so obvious at first. Oh well I will learn with practice:

Cold butter and frozen butter are not the same thing. I didn’t plan ahead well enough when I started baking, and only had a frozen stick of butter to start making the lavender tart base. The recipe called for softened butter, but I figured I could just mix the frozen butter with a food processor. It took me forever to get the butter to crumble like the recipe said it should have, using soft butter would have been much easier. (I also learned how to not put your food processor on high when mixing just flour and sugar, it goes everywhere!)
Use your hands when baking! After adding the eggs, cream, and vanilla to my flour mix — my dough refused to become dough. Meaning it wouldn’t combine properly, which I think was related to not using butter at the right temperature. I kept running it through the food processor and it would not combine. Half way through, I realized using my hands (which are warm and could further melt the butter, duh) would do a better job in getting the dough to combine. Once I rolled up my sleeves and got dirty the dough came together as it should!
Lavender smells very good when baking. Oh my lord did the lavender make my house smell good as the tart base was baking. I need to find more recipes to use this stuff! Any suggestions?
Juicing oranges takes a lot of arm strength. if you’re doing it just with your hands like me….it will take about five normal size oranges and a lot of muscle power to get the juice needed for this recipe. I was also very tempted to cheat and just use orange juice, but I didn’t.
I need a rolling pin. I used my hands to roll the dough for the tart and then just pushed it into the tart pan, but a rolling pin will be useful for future projects.