Fruit Tart (Tarte Jardinière)

Learn how to make a perfect fruit tart from scratch, including the pâte sucrée (a sweet shortcrust dough for tarts) and vanilla pastry cream. The custard tart can be topped with your preferred fruit or whatever is in season. It's highly customizable. Anything goes from fresh berries to grapes, kiwis, or even slices of citrus fruit!

The French sometimes call this tart a "tarte jardinière" because it is garnished with fruit and berries from the garden. Typically, they are made with a sweet tart crust and crème pâtissière (pastry cream) filling. Pastry cream thickened with cornstarch doesn't need any gelatin to set properly, so this fruit tart recipe does not have gelatin.

Jump to:

• Fruit Tart Components
• Ingredients
• Substitutions And Variations
• Special Tools
• How To Make A Tart With Pastry Cream And Fruit
• Tart Baking Tips: How To Get The Tart Out Of The Pan
• Storage
• Tart FAQs
• More Baking With Berries
• 📖 Recipe

Fruit Tart Components

The classic fruit tart you see in pastry shops is usually a custard tart made up of three components:

1. crust or tart shell, traditionally made from a pâte sucrée or sweet shortcrust pastry, which is basically like a sweet cookie crust.
2. custard filling, usually vanilla pastry cream (French baking term for pastry cream is crème pâtissière), though it could also be a mousseline filling, combining pastry cream with more butter (the same filling that is in the classic framboisier cake)
3. fruits, generally lots of berries, but you'll also see other fruits like segments of citrus fruit, grapes, kiwis, etc.
4. glaze, which is optional, but if your fruit isn't as fresh and sweet as you were hoping, sometimes a transparent glaze (you could even use honey or maple syrup) will add shine to the fruit garnish and also some sweetness. Powdered sugar is an alternative to the glaze.

Ingredients

There are three major components to plan for when you are making a fruit tart, and each requires its own set of ingredients.

• butter, specifically unsalted butter, though salted would also work here. You can either skip the salt in the pastry recipe if you use salted, or lean into the salt because a little extra salt in the crust will bring out the flavours
• sugar—you will need both granulated and icing sugar. The granulated sugar is for the pastry cream while the icing sugar is in the crust, leading to a more tender cookie crust
• ground almonds, which also make the dough more tender and less hard
• eggs—egg yolks for the pastry cream to help thicken and enrich it ,and for the crust too to help bind it together
• milk—for a creamier custard filling, use whole milk with 3.25 % or 2 % fat milk. I don't recommend using skim milk here because the filling needs a little fat to make it rich and creamy.
• flour and cornstarch to hold the tart dough together and give it structure, just like a rolled sugar cookie dough and to thicken the pastry cream so that it is firmer when chilled.
• vanilla—you can use vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste, adding either of these to the pastry cream after it has cooked, or you can use a vanilla bean, added to the milk before you heat it up to temper the eggs
• fruit garnish—I like to garnish fruit tarts with a variety of fruit, picking what's in season, but also what fruits would look nice together on a tart. Think of contrasting colours, but also think of picking fruits that vary in shades of the same colour for an ombré effect. You can easily use canned fruit. Choose fruit canned in sugar-based syrup or fruit juice because they taste better than any fruit canned in water (which is sweetened with sucralose!).

Please see the recipe card for the exact ingredients and quantities.

Substitutions And Variations

The classic fruit tart served in most French pastry shops is filled with pastry cream, usually flavoured with vanilla extract, vanilla bean paste or a vanilla bean.

• Alternate sugars—You could consider using a mixture of sugar and honey or maple syrup in the pastry cream, and that would bring a lot of flavour to this dessert.
• Flavouring pastry cream—The beauty of pastry cream is that you can infuse the milk with a lot of flavours, and it's a sweet creamy blank canvas that balances out the acidity of the fruit garnish. Try infusing the hot milk with tea or coffee (you can strain out the leaves or coffee grinds later), or a little tonka bean. Cardamom works beautifully here, or in the fall, consider warm spices to pair with a fruit topping of poached pears or poached quince.
• Alternate fillings—Just because most people make fruit tarts with pastry cream doesn't mean you don't have options. You can also consider filling the baked tart shell with:
  • chocolate ganache, like this raspberry chocolate tart or this rhubarb chocolate tart
  • panna cotta, like for these Earl Grey panna cotta tarts
  • fruit curd, like lemon curd, like these matcha tarts filled with passion fruit curd

Special Tools

Aside from the usual baking tools you already have on hand, to make a fruit tart, or any tart, you will need a few tools:

• a tart pan with a removable bottom—this type of tart pan will make it easier for you to unmould the tart. If you are in a hurry, you can even unmould the blind-baked shell when it's still warm. This will also speed up the cooling process.
• a sheet pan—because we bake tarts in tart pans with a removable bottom, there is a big risk that, if you aren't paying attention when loading it into and out of the oven, you may grab the pan in the wrong way, un-moulding or breaking the tart shell, especially if it's still hot and fragile. To avoid this, always place your tart pan on a sheet pan. This way you are moving the sheet pan from fridge-to-counter-to-oven, thus protecting your tart shell.
• a rolling pin—some bakers prefer straight rolling pins, but I am most comfortable using a French rolling pin, with tapered ends. Regardless of the shape, I highly recommend investing in a rolling pin made of wood. I much prefer it to silicone rolling pins.
• a pastry brush—not only will you use this to brush off any excess flour from rolling out the pastry dough, you will also use it to brush melted chocolate inside the baked tart shell to seal it to help keep it dry from the moisture of the filling.

How To Make A Tart With Pastry Cream And Fruit

Fruit tarts make stunning desserts. But because they are so pretty to look at, bakers may feel intimidated, thinking that the dessert is complicated to make. I'm here to tell you it's not. Break it down and you'll see that to make a fruit tart at home, you will rely on basic baking techniques you've probably already mastered:

1. The creaming method is a mixing method commonly used to make cookie dough starting from softened butter which is combined with sugar until well mixed with a lighter texture. The tart shell is made from cookie dough that is rolled out. If you can make rolled sugar cookies, you should be able to make this!
2. Blind-baking, where you bake the tart shell until it is completely baked and golden-brown delicious. You use this technique for tarts where the filling is prepared/cooked separately. The tart shell must be baked through and completely cooled before filling, as a rule.
3. Tempering eggs, which is a method to gently warm up eggs before cooking them on the stove, either to make a custard sauce (crème anglaise) or a pastry cream, like in the recipe below.
4. Chabloner is a technique that pastry chefs use. Professionals will brush the inside of blind-baked tart shells with melted chocolate. When the chocolate sets, this creates a barrier between the filling and the crust. The tart shell will not soften or absorb moisture from the filling, allowing you to store the tarts for longer without compromising texture or flavour.

Step 1—Start by making the tart dough because you will have to chill it. Combine the butter, icing sugar and ground almond in a large bowl (image 1) and mix it until it is very cream before adding the egg yolk (image 2). Then stir in the flour (image 3) and the milk to bind it together (image 4)

Step 2—Wrap the dough in plastic wrap to chill it until firm. Shape the dough into a disk because you will roll it out to fit a round tart pan. Once the dough has chilled enough, roll it out and line the tart pan with the rolled-out dough, docking it with a fork to prevent air pockets from forming (image 6) and bake it until it is baked through. The edges will be golden brown and recede a little from the pan (image 7).

Step 3—While the tart shell is chilling and baking, make the pastry cream by whisking together the egg yolks and sugar (image 8) before incorporating the cornstarch (image 9). This is to ensure there are no lumps. Pour the hot milk over the egg mixture to temper the yolks (image 10) before transferring the mixture back to the saucepan to cook on the stove and thicken the custard filling (image 11).

Step 4—Add the butter to the cooked custard off the heat (image 12). Add the vanilla bean paste or vanilla extract (image 13), and then strain the mixture to remove any lumps or hard-cooked egg bits (image 14). Wrap tightly with plastic wrap, ensuring the wrap is in contact with the custard so that it doesn't form a skin (image 15).

Step 5—Once the tart shell has cooled, you can brush the inside of the shell with melted white chocolate to seal it and prevent the crust from getting soggy (image 17), and then fill with pastry cream (image 17) and garnish with berries (images 18 and 19).

Tart Baking Tips: How To Get The Tart Out Of The Pan

It's no secret that unmoulding a tart from a tart pan can be stressful. But tart pans with removable bottoms take some of that stress away. Here's how to remove a tart from a tart pan:

1. Place the pan carefully over an inverted bowl, or anything with a smaller diameter than the tart pan
2. Let the tart ring slide down
3. Lift the tart up
4. Lift the tart off the disk base or slide it off the disk base onto your serving plate.

If the tart is stuck to the bottom piece of the pan, you may have to use an offset spatula, gliding it gently between the flat metal base and the tart shell to unstick it. But really, that's it! Once the tart shell has cooled down, it should be sturdy enough to manipulate without worrying that it will fall apart.

Storage

This fruit tart should be refrigerated, but I can say, if you take it out to serve it, it can easily sit out for a few hours at room temperature. You will still be able to slice it cleanly, and the filling won't soften too much. This is yet another reason why I opted for cornstarch in this recipe, not flour. The filling is more stable to temperature fluctuations, yet still creamy and smooth.

Tart FAQs

More Baking With Berries

Make the most of berry season with these desserts baked with berries, from a simple blueberry crumb cake to a more complex blueberry lattice pie:

If you tried this recipe for the best fruit tart (or any other recipe on my website), please leave a ⭐ star rating and let me know how it went in the comments below. I love hearing from you!

📖 Recipe