Mini Fruit Tarts are my jam! You know how sometimes you have a favorite dessert that just has a choke hold on you and no matter what you do you can’t stop thinking about it? Well, that’s what the La Madeline Fruit Tart was for me. Creamy and delicious vanilla pastry cream speckled with vanilla bean paste. Sweet and tart topped with fresh berries, kiwi slices, mandarin oranges, and slivers of red grapes. The shortcrust pastry was always buttery and lightly sweetened. And the whole thing together was a harmonious bite of buttery pastry, smooth vanilla creme patisserie, and tart fresh fruit segments. Today I’m showing you my quick and easy mini fruit tarts where I’ve gone ahead and used mini store-bought tart shells instead of making the shortbread crust from scratch. This cuts down on the prep work for this recipe quite a bit. It also makes homemade mini-tarts a lot more accessible for those of us that aren’t big on baking! But you could certainly use your own recipe to make the crust as well. You could also make sugar cookie cups made from store-bought sugar cookie dough and just press it into your muffin pan and bake. I do find that this makes the fruit tarts significantly sweeter than using shortcrust pastry tart shells or mini pie crusts, so I usually prefer to stick with the other options. I’m also skipping the kiwi, oranges, and grapes and going all in with the berry medley – bring on the blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries! Fruit tartlets are festive enough for the 4th of July and yet easy and pretty enough to serve at a Mother’s Day brunch or a shower!
Ingredients for Mini Fruit Tarts
Mini Pie or Tart Shells: You can use store-bought prepared tart shells that don’t require any preparation or you can use mini pie shells that just require baking. You can also make homemade shortcrust pastry tart crusts from your favorite recipe and fill them with my pastry cream recipe and top them with fresh fruit.Assorted Fruits or Berries: this time around, I made this recipe with just fresh berries. You can also use your favorite cubed fruit instead. Mangoes, kiwi pieces, red grapes cut in half, mandarin slices, and so many other things would work beautifully on these.Apricot Preserves: I thin out apricot jam and use it as a glaze on the tarts. It not only gives the fruit tarts a beautiful sheen, but it also adds just a hint of sweetness to tart fruits.Granulated Sugar: This is the sweetener for the pastry cream.Egg Yolks: Are used for the creme patisserie. The fat in the yolks adds richness and thickens the vanilla pastry cream. Egg yolks are a very common ingredient in pastry cream for many tart recipes.Cornstarch: Helps thinking the creme patisserie (or vanilla pastry cream.) A lot of recipes call for flour instead of cornstarch, but I find that cornstarch not only makes the pastry cream gluten-free it also gives it a silkier texture than flour.Milk: We’ll simmer the milk with the heavy cream to create the custard for the mini fruit tarts. I usually prefer to use 2% milk here because the heavy cream, it gives the pastry cream the right ratio of cream.Heavy Cream: Goes in with the milk. Heavy cream is labeled as ‘heavy whipping cream’ in some countries. Essentially you want a cream that has at least 36% fat content.Salad Butter: I like to use salted butter that we’ll add to the pastry cream right at the end. If you don’t have salted butter on hand, just add a pinch of kosher salt when you’re stirring in the butter.Vanilla Bean Paste or Vanilla Extract: I like to use vanilla bean paste for this recipe because the pastry cream then has speckles of vanilla bean running through it. If you don’t have vanilla bean paste on hand, feel free to use vanilla extract. The only difference is you’ll want to up the amount of extract you use and add it in at the end so that it doesn’t evaporate when you’re cooking the creme patisserie.
How to make mini fruit tarts that are perfect to entertain with:
If you like this dessert recipe, you might also like:
Glowing Berry Fruit SaladThe Best Fruit PizzaKey Lime Pie BarsEasy Texas Blueberry CobblerGlazed Lemon Raspberry Bundt Cake
Tart shells: Use your favorite shortcrust pastry recipe, store-bought shells, or even cookie cups made out of sugar cookie dough. My grocery store sells ~2-inch pie shells that I blind baked and used for this. Use pie weights or beans if you feel the crust may rise during baking.Fruit toppings: I like to use a berry medley for this typically. But sometimes I’ll do chunks of kiwi, mango, or even grapes. Feel free to use any fruit that you like here.
