Oxford Weekend

Last week Ben and I headed up to Oxford for the Weekend. The main reason for the trip was to tour the MBA program there, and we decided to make a nice little weekend out of it. Oxford is stunningly beautiful. The buildings, grounds, gardens, and river walks are all breathtaking. The history is entirely fascinating and the culture is awe-inspiring. 

 We walked around several of the museums in Oxford, the building pictured above is the Natural History Museum, which was half under construction so sadly all the dinosaur exhibits were closed. The Science Museum was small but had an impressive collection of the first telescopes and microscopes, as well as an exhibit of the equipment used to make the first penicillin. The Science Museum also had a chalkboard that Albert Einstein has used while giving a lecture on general relativity at Oxford.

Pumpkin Pie Tartlets

Pumpkin is not a very popular ingredient here in England. In fact, none of my coworkers had ever eaten any dessert with pumpkin in it. No pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, no pumpkin cheese cake, no pumpkin bread, no pumpkin pie. Sure around Halloween people carve pumpkins, but there is no fall time obsession with pumpkin treats as there is in America. 

As soon as I found out that none of my coworkers had ever had a pumpkin dessert I decided to make little pumpkin pie tartlets. Another fact, cans of pumpkin puree are also difficult to find in London. I have heard that a few stores sell them, but none of them were close to me, so I made my own pumpkin puree out of a cute pumpkin I purchased at the store. 

Needless to say the tartlets turned out delicious and everyone loved them. They were all devoured quickly, and if I were to bring pumpkin pie to work again I would not do it in the miniature form. 

To make these little tartlets I followed a classic pumpkin pie recipe:

For the crust I just used store bought pie dough and rolled it out and used my Williams Sonoma tartlet baking set to mold my crust 

For the filling :

1 cups Pumpkin puree 

1/2 cups brown sugar

3 tsp mixed spice or pumpkin spice

2 eggs

1/2 cup heavy cream 

Top with freshly whipped whip cream (fun fact: I had to whip the whipped cream by hand with a fork when I made these for my coworkers, as there was no whisk, an certainly no hand mixer at work :) ) 

This made approximately 24 miniature tartlets.