A few weeks ago, while browsing the websites of Paris’s top pâtisseries, I spotted Hugo et Victor’s Tarte Fraise (strawberry tart). The pastry’s strawberry-red shell complemented its meticulously arranged strawberry slices superbly—I was quite inspired by its colour.

This weekend, I had a chance to experiment with adding food colouring to tart dough. The results were impressive. The trick is to use a food colouring that does not lose its pigment when baked.

Wilton’s gel food colouring has a tendency to turn brown when baked. When I first started making French macarons, regardless of how vibrant the batter was before baking, the final product always turned out brown. The reason? I was using Wilton’s gel food colouring.  Since then, I’ve switched to powdered food colouring and it works splendidly.

In fact, it works too well. I burnt the bottom of the tart shell because the abundance of food colouring in the dough meant that it went straight from vibrant red to black in just a few minutes—there is no progressive browning like you would see with un-dyed tart shells. No matter, since after I scraped off the burnt bits the shell tasted great.

Inside the tart, starting from the bottom, is a thin layer of melted white chocolate. The purpose of the white chocolate, as I’ve written about before, is to prevent the tart shell from absorbing too much moisture from the pastry cream. The chocolate acts as a barrier.

More importantly, in my case, the white chocolate held together fragile parts of the tart. Since I didn’t have a square tart ring, I had to use a tall square pastry ring/mould. I cut out a square of dough, placed it at the bottom of the pastry ring, and then placed strips of dough in the ring to form the sides of the tart (the dough didn’t go to the top of the pastry ring). The connection between the sides and the base was weak, and thus the white chocolate helped keep everything together. You won’t have this problem if you don’t go with a square shape, and you definitely don’t have to.

Above the white chocolate is a very thin layer of almond and rose pastry cream (you can’t see it in the photo) and then a layer of almond sponge cake. Above that is a thick  layer of the pastry cream and strawberries, sliced into quarters.

I decorated the tart with mint sprigs, dried rose petals (I bought these on my recent trip to London), and toasted meringue. If you’d like to keep it simple, you can skip all of these decorations or pick and choose the ones you like. Some sprout leaves, like I used in my key lime and raspberry tarts, would be very nice here too.

This tart is very light and refreshing. A perfect way to end strawberry season! (Much easier too than the strawberry-shaped entremet cakes I made a couple of weeks ago.)