Little Blackberry & Strawberry Tartlets

Also known in some circles as a Fruit Pizza and because it has fruit — it’s healthy! Huzzah!

I made these tonight and they were very good. I think I saw this concept originally in a Seventeen magazine in the 1980’s. Hee! I’m old.

As these were small and cookie-sized (as opposed to big, pizza-sized), I prefer the petit moniker of tartlet.

Ingredients:

Sugar Cookie Recipe or Lazy-Lazy Cookie Dough in a Tube
Cream Cheese
Orange Liqueur
Sugar
Fruit of some kind (blackberries, boysenberries, blueberries, strawberries, etc.)
Orange Marmalade
Mint sprigs

What I did with above ingredients:

I sort of threw them all together from memory and instead of making one big sugar cookie, I went ahead and made smaller ones — hence the tartlets. I also cheated and used the sugar cookie dough in a tube. Just like Sandra Lee. Except, that I didn’t use a seasoning packet or some hideous kind of extract to give it that homemade taste, just so that I could lie to everyone about how I slaved away in the kitchen all day and “take all the credit”.

Erm…anyway, while the cookies cooled on a wire rack, I got the cream cheese mixture together. This entailed using about 1/3 of a block of cream cheese, a tablespoon or so of orange liqueur and a tablespoon or so of sugar. After a quick taste I added a bit more liqueur and sugar, tasted again, exclaimed “mmmmm,” and then popped the bowl in the fridge so it would chill.

A half hour later…
Berries were then washed, patted dry and cut in half (the blackberries were huge!) and the mint was chiffonaded*. I went out to the garden and found about six strawberries to add to the mix. After spreading the cream cheese mixture on the cookie tops, I placed the berries in a –hopefully– artful arrangement.

Then, I remembered reading in the original Seventeen article, to use melted apricot jam as a glaze, so that the fruit would stay nice and fresh looking. I looked in the fridge. We always seem to get those little jams from Swiss Colony at Christmas from one of my relatives, but for once, I couldn’t find any. We did have orange marmalade, though. Close enough! I popped a small dish of that in the microwave for about 30 seconds and brushed that on the tops of the berries. It actually seemed to work just fine. Then I sprinkled the tartlets with mint.

We ate all 6 of them — they were small! Tiny, really. Can you even see them? Squint.

I think if I lived in Deadwood, I would open a little restaurant instead of a whorehouse.

* Chiffonade. Take a few leaves and roll them up together vertically, so that you have a short, tight, little cylinder of mint. Slice the mint up so that when they unravel, you have all these little strips. Rachael Ray can be annoying, but she can give some really good tips too.