The 2010 November Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Simona of briciole. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make pasta frolla for a crostata. She used her own experience as a source, as well as information from Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well.
A crostata is an Italian tart or pie. The base of a crostata is pasta frolla (or pastafrolla), sweet short crust pastry (or sweet tart dough) made of flour, sugar, butter and eggs. Pasta frolla is versatile: it provides the base to make crostata with fruit preserves, pastry cream, fresh fruit, ricotta, and other ingredients, and, by itself, it makes very nice cookies.
The pastry was wonderful! It lends itself well to savoury tarts as well so this one's a keeper. We could choose whatever filling we wanted, so I decided to use pastry cream (I love it!). But I realised I had a bottle of great blackberry jam, so i added a layer of that over the cream as well.
I'm so glad I could do this challenge because this tart was lovely! My mom is not a dessert person but even she had a second helping! I'm definitely going to try this with other fillings as well, maybe fresh fruits next time? Thank you so much Simona, it was a great challenge :)
