Method

Pistachio praline

Roast your pistachios in the oven for 15 min at 170C (340F). In a saucepan, heat together at medium heat your sugar and water, until the mixture is a light brown colour. If you want to be very precise, you can opt to use a thermometer! The caramel should be at 185C (365F). Pour onto the roasted pistachios. Leave it until everything cools down before mixing in a food processor until you get a paste. You’ve got your praline.

Pistachio pastry cream

In a saucepan, bring the milk and cream to a boil. In a separate bowl, whisk your egg yolks with sugar, before adding corn starch and flour. Pour 1/3 of the hot milk in the egg mixture. Whisk well and pour back in the pot with 2/3 left. Heat everything together while continuously whisking. Whisk for 2 min after it starts to boil, this is to ensure that the eggs and flour are properly cooked. Remove from the heat. Add in your butter and pistachio praline and mix with an immersion blender. Transfer in another bowl and cover with cling film. Let it cool in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

Sugar pie dough

With your Stand mixer bowl, with the flat beater, whisk together almond, butter, icing sugar and salt at low speed. Once homogenous, add the eggs one by one. Don’t worry if there are still lumps, they will disappear once we add flour. Add the flour, little by little. The dough should not be smooth, but clumpy. Remove from the bowl and finish smoothing it out by hand. The reason why we are doing this? We want to make sure that we don’t over knead our dough. Lots of bakers have trouble with their pie dough retracting when they bake it. It’s because the gluten is activated and becomes elastic. If you knead it too long (even with the flat beater!) when baking, the dough will retract. Cover your dough and let it rest for at least 2 hours in the fridge.

You can either line the dough in a regular tart mould or line on a tart ring: Cut out 1/3 of the dough and keep in the fridge. Spread the bigger part until desired thickness (2‑3 mm for us). Cut the dough according to the size of tart ring. Transfer the dough on tart ring on your parchment paper. Spread the other part of the shortcrust dough until you get a 2‑3 mm thickness and cut into bands that are as large as the height of your ring (mould). Line onto your ring and the other part of the shortcrust. Make sure it is well lined, cut the sticking parts and very important: poke the dough with the fork everywhere.

Bake in the oven at 170C (340F) for 20 minutes or until light brown. Remove the tart ring if you have one, bake for 10 more minutes to make sure the sides of the tart are baked. Let your tart cool down for at least 30 minutes.

Vanilla cream

Warm the cream and add in white chocolate and gelatine sheet and set in the fridge. When set, take it out, whisk with an electric whisk, add in the mascarpone cheese, and whisk again until it thickens.

Chocolate ganache

Warm the cream, add chocolate, stir well and leave to rest.

Assembly:

Using a piping bag, fill in the tart with pistachio praline from the bottom (careful, it’s tasty, but the more you put in, the sweeter your dessert will be), followed by pastry cream.

Top it with chocolate ganache and keep in the fridge to set.

Take it from the fridge and pipe the dome of vanilla cream on top of the tart and garnish with cut raspberries and marigold leaves and pistachio praline.