Triumph and Fruit Tart

While in France this summer (a story that will be elaborated upon later), I had to provide my own lunches every day. This meant food on a budget, which meant lots of home cooking (no complaints here). Now, I'm not a cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I do know enough to be able to feed myself, even if it is mostly a diet of fried eggs and toast. Many of my fellow kitchen-dwellers this summer have opened my eyes up to the wonders of food knowledge and preparation, even in the simplest of dishes. The kitchen would be filled with the aroma of onions being fried to perfection, the faint waft of pasta, a sharp tang of spicy sausage, and the thick green scent of chopped vegetables.
And so, in that too-small kitchen with too many cooks, I told myself I would learn to cook and I would learn about cooking. My palate is not the most refined; fast food is still delicious to me, at least for the first two bites, and one of my favorite foods is mac and cheese. But still, by learning about ingredients and how they can recombine and complement each other, I hoped to be able to depart from following recipes to creating my own.

To that end, the first thing I decided to make upon my arrival back home was a fruit tart. Berries hold a special place in my heart, even though they're almost never as good as I think they are, and I have a soft spot for custard, so I often crave fruit tarts though I never buy them.
I followed the recipe here to make this, with some slight modifications. There was a small crisis near the middle of the process when I realized that my custard was nothing like the smooth, thick consistency custard is supposed to be. Instead, it was...bouncy. My mixing bowl contained a semi-solid rubbery lump, and I unsuccessfully fought urges to poke it and watch it jiggle. Luckily, in a last-ditch effort to save my custard abomination, I added in some extra milk and whisked it furiously. It revived itself and began resembling normal, creamy, delicious custard as I pretended my arm was a jet engine. With that fiasco miraculously avoided, the rest of the tart came together beautifully in a delectable collision of buttery crust, custard, and fresh fruit.