Tropical Rum Fruit Melba cases

Not much time today, with this in mind I wanted to do a fairly quick little sweet pastry cake so Tropical Rum Fruit Melba cases are perfect. These little individual fruit cases are simple to make, the majority of the time involved is in the finishing off with whipped double cream, a hint of rum and some tropical fruit. The sweet pastry cases take around 15 minutes to bake. You will need Piping bags for the finishing off process, some mixing bowls and utensils.

I used a muffin tin which turned out to be to deep, so perhaps a cupcake tin would do, certainly needs to be shallower. You will have to press the cut sweet pastry into the paper cases, its best to flatten out before placing into paper cases, I suppose you can leave the baked pastry cases in the paper cases if you want or like i have done take out of the paper cases, after baking.

For the filling you will need around 250ml of double cream, a tot of rum or rum essence  a mixture of tinned or fresh tropical fruit drained and chopped. Fondant icing not to runny but not over stiff, for piping over the cream.

Method: Tropical Rum Fruit Melba cases

Prepare your tropical fruit, dice small enough so that you can place different flavours into the sweet pastry case, leave to drain, now make your sweet pastry...

Basic Sweet Pastry recipe

So roll out your sweet pastry and use a large fluted cookie cutter, further press and shape with your hands then lay into the paper cases, finish off by pressing the pastry around and up the sides of the paper case. At this point you may want to blind bake, that is if you are a perfectionist! otherwise stab the cases with the point of a sharp knife, then bake for 15 minutes depending on your oven at around 180 Celsius electric. Allow to cool off before filling, this won't take more than 10 minutes. If you haven't blind baked you will have slight rises in the bottom of the pastry case, don't worry about it... carry on.

Filling your cases

Fill your baked sweet pastry cases with the prepared tropical fruit, don't overfill them, because you still need to pipe your cream on top.

Add rum tot or essence into your double cream then whip the cream up, you don't want it too stiff as it will be more difficult to work with, once you have your desired thickness place into a piping bag with a plain nozzle. Starting from the edges of the pastry cases pipe your double cream over the fruit filling finishing in the centre  Now prepare your fondant icing and pipe over the cream in a circular motion starting from top centre of the cake but not right to the edges as the fondant will spread. Finish off with some candied fruit cake topper or whatever you want. Just a note on the double cream, i have not added any additional sugar as there is plenty of sweetness from the fondant, it balances out very well.

These Tropical Rum Fruit Melba cases are made with fresh cream so it's best to eat them on the day, at a stretch no more than 48 hours. You can substitute the fresh cream with any synthetic cream or why not use butter cream.