Blueberry Lemon Tarts ... Not Quite Vegan

I'd been thinking about baking some blueberry lemon tarts pretty much since Spring started hinting that it was coming.  Though I normally prefer chocolate desserts, once the weather starts to warm up I begin craving fruity sweets, and I thought these would be the perfect treat to try to veganize.  For the tart crust, all I had to do was sub out Earth Balance for regular butter.  It has the same consistency and flavor and I really have yet to find a single recipe for which this doesn't sub out butter perfectly. 

I prepared the dough following this recipe (but used water instead of vodka ... I don't know about that one). 

With just a few ingredients, and not even any need to let the butter soften, it came together really quickly. 

Once the dough was pulled together I had to let it sit in the fridge for 1/2 hour.

Once the dough was nice and cool I used a glass to cut rounds and pressed them into a small cupcake tray.  In hindsight I think I should have rolled the dough about half the thickness, but they still cooked through this way and came out flaky and delicious.

While the tart shells were cooking I warmed some blueberries and sugar on the stove for my topping.  The plan was to fill each shell with a bit of lemon curd and top with the sweetened blueberries.  Yum, right?  But that's where I went wrong again ...

Yet again I failed to look at the label on the back of the container before buying something ...  I guess the use of the word "curd" should perhaps have tipped me off that lemon curd wasn't the same as jam or jelly, but for some reason I just assumed it was basically sugar and fruit boiled in water.  Well, apparently not.  Lemon curd actually involves both eggs and milk.  Great one, Lindsay.  Yet again you bought an obviously non-vegan item because you were too lazy to turn the bottle around and read the back.  Plus now I have a ton of lemon curd left to use up or just toss out.  Excellent. 

The finished product was quite tasty though.  But I think they would have been just as good without the lemon curd layer with just vegan tart crust and blueberries on top.  Maybe I could have added some lovely coconut cream instead ...  I guess I will try that next time. 

 

They still came out looking very pretty and tasting excellent.  The batch of 12 was gone by the end of the weekend ...