Tarte Au Citron

Begin with making your sweet pasty. Mix the flour and icing sugar together - a really straight forward part.

Next you will need to rub in your butter. To make this easier, I find cutting the butter into cubes helps it break apart in the mix.

Rub in all of the butter until the mix is crumbly in your hands.

Remove the yolks of your eggs as you will not want to use the egg whites here.

Add the yolks to your mix and mix everything together, preferrably with an electric whisk.

Keep mixing until your mixture is crumbly like this.

Add a tablespoon of water and mix it in with your hands. You should see your dough forming now.

Sprinkle flour onto a work surface and roll out your pastry.

Make sure that your pastry is pretty much the thickness of a £1 coin.

Wrap it in cling film and leave to chill in the fridge for 30 minutes. Now you can begin working on your filling.

Mix together your 5 eggs (disgarding the egg whites from the pastry), caster sugar and cream.

Squeeze in the juice of your lemons.

Take out your pastry from the fridge and line your baking tin with it. Put this back into the fridge for another 30 minutes.

Back to the filling - grate the lemon skins to get the zest. I know normally this is done before juicing the lemons, but for this recipe it's nice to have a really soft, pulpy zest to use.

Put the zest into your filling mix.

IF you want to sprinkle chocolate over the completed tarte, then my personal preference is to use a Cadbury Twirl as it crumbles easily and has a good, creamy flavour that suits the tangy lemon well.

Heat your oven to gas mark 3 / 160C. Take your pastry base out of the fridge and cover with foil. Bake for 10 minutes.

Remove the foil from the pastry and bake for a further 20 minutes.

Take out of the oven and pour in the lemon mixture while the pastry is still warm.

Bake for 30 minutes

Take it out of your oven and leave to cool in the fridge.

You're going to want to leave it for no less than 1 hour as the mixture needs to be allowed time to become firmer. Once you have done this, remove it from the fridge and carefully take it out of your tin. Sprinkle with the crumbled chocolate if you wish.

Et voila!