I fought the good fight...and lost

When Cinco de Mayo officially took a turn (for better or worse) and became an American drinking holiday- I'm not sure. All I know is that it is a pretty good marker of when it is time to put away the red wine in favor of summer margaritas. As a pretty big fan of margaritas (the tuna margarita at Agua Verde my personal favorite in Seattle, runner up is the blackberry margarita at Rays boathouse), I was pretty excited to attempt creating my own margarita mix for the occasion. However, I was also in charge of making a Mexican desert for the party/dinner I was attending that night.

Those who know me know that I am not a cook, and I don't pretend to be one. Making margarita mix from scratch might even be pushing my culinary skills to the limit. However, I felt particularly ambitious on Saturday and decided to attempt a lime tart (after ruling out flan - is there anyone who doesn't think this desert is gross? I mean, the texture alone is unappetizing). My thinking was that lime = margaritas = tart. I dug up a Barefoot Contessa recipe - she seems to have easy recipes and I have seen an episode where she made a lime tart - it appeared doable.

The crust was the easy part - four ingredients. I make it through the mixing and baking ok, but when attempting to take it out of the oven, the removable bottom from the tart pan jumped off, burning my arm and causing me to drop the tart crust. Turns out it was salvageable, but at this point, I should have thrown in the towel. However, I had already put in too much effort to give up - so I continued (actually, I went to my hair appointment and I pawned the custard-making off on Graeme).

Turns out - custard is really hard to perfect. I returned home to a very sad tart. It was brown. Not the crust. The custard. The custard is actually supposed to be lime green (think key lime pie). It was carmel brown - and gooey. Poor Graeme had attempted to spiff it up by adding fresh lime slices as a garnish. It didn't work.

We ended up picking up a pre-made pie and ice cream at PCC on the way to the dinner party - which was actually pretty delicious. We did attempt a bite of the tart after arriving home, which just re-enforced that is was, in fact, completely inedible.