I’ve Never Met a Tart I Didn’t Like! 3 Recipes from Tarts Anon

By Leigh O’Connor.

What began as a sideline hustle during COVID lockdowns has snowballed into a hit retail store in Melbourne’s Cremorne for Tarts Anon’s Gareth Whitton and partner, Catherine Way.

An appearance on MasterChef Australia followed for Gareth along with a winning run on the smash hit spin-off Dessert Masters – he does all the baking while Catherine, a speech pathologist with a handy knack for dessert logistics, oversees everything else. 

 

Tarts Anon does one thing exceptionally well – tarts – and in the couple’s first self-titled cookbook they reveal the secrets to baking a stunning tart, every time.

The perfect dessert in Gareth’s opinion, tarts are the one pastry form that transcends all genres, from top-end dining to regional bakeries. At a minimum, you get buttery, melt-in-your-mouth pastry, which is in turn a vessel for an unlimited array of flavours and textures.

Then there’s the beauty of taking something so entrenched in history and bringing it into the 21st Century with modern techniques.

Tarts have always been special to Gareth – it all started with him making a plum and almond tart at his first kitchen job and carried on to later in his career.

Whenever it was his turn to make staff dessert, that tiny bit of extra effort to make a pastry base to fill with kitchen scraps that usually found their way to the staff table was enough to make the rest of the team think they had been treated to something special.

This love was rekindled during COVID when after much persistence or nagging – depending on who you ask – from Catherine, what started as a romantic afternoon baking soon turned into a side hustle. Now Gareth shares his passion and secrets to making the perfect tart in this cookbook, from the beloved plain old lemon tart to something a bit more out-of-the-box.

Here are three recipes he shares with AGFG home cooks:

 

"Let’s start this recipe with a disclaimer: this is not a tiramisu. This is a tart inspired by the flavours of a tiramisu. The whole thing actually came about by mistake; we were trying to bake a cake underneath a custard. Naturally that custard soaked straight through the cake,” Gareth explains.

"It wasn’t what we were going for, but it tasted delicious and just like a tiramisu.”

There are two different coffee flavours happening here – the espresso that soaks into the cake and the coffee beans that are infused into the cream. The coffee bean-infused cream came from a Pier recipe Gareth cooked early in his career – it imparts savoury and toasty flavours to the cream, rather than the fruity and acidic forward profiles in espresso. How very un-tiramisu-like.

This tart was initially inspired by one of Gareth’s favourite desserts, a dish he made in one of his first jobs at Pier restaurant in Sydney. It was a white peach sorbet with white peaches, mango jelly and a boozy Sauternes-based custard.

 

Many years later, working as a development Chef at Lune Croissanterie, he created a pastry using a similar flavour combination for a mini croissant tart, but COVID-19 struck and it never made it to the menu. So, you could say this tart was a long time in the making.

Umeshu is a sweet, fruit-forward liqueur that is made from Japanese plums (called ume) and pairs perfectly with stone fruits.

 

This is Catherine’s favourite of the savoury tarts and although Gareth would never deign to admit this, if you’re looking for a ‘lighter’ option that’s a real brunch crowd-pleaser, then this is the one.

It is essentially a tart-ified form of the done-to-death (but we can see why) Melbourne brunch menu item of some kind of orange root vegetable, goats’ cheese and spinach. Whenever it’s on the menu, the couple’s baby will happily munch away at the excess sweet potato while they get work done at the shop.

Simple, elegant and versatile, tarts are no piece of cake but with ’Tarts Anon’ at your fingertips, a world of show-stopping bakes awaits!