150gcreme fraiche or whipping cream or cream cheese
Instructions
Sugar pie dough
Use the flat beater with your stand mixer bowl to whisk together almond, butter, icing sugar and salt at low speed. Once homogeneous, 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, it should still be 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 overknead our dough.Lots of bakers have trouble with their pie dough retracting when they bake it. It's actually because gluten activates and becomes elastic. If you knead the dough for too long (even with the flat beater!), it can retract during baking. Cover your dough and let it rest for 2 hours in the fridge. Before rolling the tart in the ring, let the dough at room temperature for 10 minutes. You can now line the dough on your tart or cake ring. First grease your ring with butter. Cut out 1/3 of the dough and keep in the fridge. Spread the bigger part until you reach desired thickness (for me it's 3 mm) between two sheets of parchment paper. Remove the upper layer of parchment paper. Put the dough+ parchment paper on a baking tray. Put the tart ring on top of the dough and push. This will cut the dough with your tart ring. Remove the dough excess but keep your tart ring on the dough. Spread the other part of the shortcrust dough until you get a 2‑3 mm thickness. Cut into bands that are as large as the height of your ring (mould). Line onto your ring and the bottom part of the shortcrust. Make sure it is well lined, cutting the sticking parts. And very important: poke the dough with the fork everywhere. If you are unsure of the technique, Watch my video showing how to line a tart.Leave the dough in the fridge for at least 30 minutes
Pastry cream
Put the vanilla pod in milk and let warm it up in a pot until it starts boiling. Let the vanilla pod in the milk for 15 minutes.In a separate bowl, mix the egg yolk with the sugar then add the cornstarch and whisk. Put 1/3 of the milk in the egg mixture. Mix well and put this back to the pot.Heat everything together while continuously stirring. Stir for 3 min after it thickens. Remove from the stove before adding butter and creme fraiche. Mix well, with a hand mixer if you have one.
Baking
Preheat your oven at 170C(340F). Pour pastry cream onto cold pie dough. Fill up to 3/4 of the height of the pie dough. Bake for 45 min. Let the flan cool down at room temperature for 1h then in the fridge for at least 5 hours.