Lemon tart with vanilla mascarpone

My parents came to my house for Christmas year and I didn't want a shop-bought dessert for a special occasion. My dad doesn't like chocolate so I decided a lemon tart would be a good end to Christmas dinner - not too heavy, but still indulgent.

I have loads of recipe books but I was thinking about this at work when I didn't have access to any of them, so decided to see if I could find a good recipe online. And this is what I came up with:

http://www.lovemoney.com/news/household-bills/shopping-around/4361/frugal-recipes--xmas-special-dessert?source=1000557

Apparently it's also a low-cost "frugal" recipe, which always helps!

I also wanted the chance to use a lovely pie dish my boyfriend's mum had given me for Christmas the year before. It's quite big, and there were only three of us for Christmas dinner so I knew the tart would be a lot bigger than we needed, but we managed to eat it all over the next couple of days :-)

The recipe actually recommended using shop-bought pastry, which was nice as I may well have cheated and done it anyway! Usually when I buy Jus-Roll pastry it comes in a block that you have to roll out, but this actually came in a long thin packet and all you had to do was unroll it - no rolling-pin required! And it was almost exactly the right size for my pie dish.

As you will see from the recipe if you click on the link, it is pretty easy to make the pie filling. Which is good as I was making it on Christmas Eve, just a few hours before my parents arrived, and I was also cooking a ham and making cupcakes at the same time - literally swapping between bowls and taking one thing out of the oven and putting another thing straight in! In retrospect it's probably surprising I didn't get the recipes mixed up and accidentally put the crushed oreos for the cupcake into the lemon pie mixture or something!

When the pie came out of the oven, some areas on the top had gone a little browner than others, but otherwise it turned out great. I made the mascarpone vanilla cream from the recipe to serve with it, but as always substituted vanilla flavouring for fresh vanilla. I then sprinkled edible yellow glitter over the top of the tart to serve.

I've also decided to enter this into Frugal Food Fridays from Fuss Free Flavours, as it's a low cost recipe :-)