Fruit T(art) and Baking Blind

My First Two Fruit Tarts
For my birthday I received a gift certificate to a baking shop and decided to tackle fruit tarts next. I bought my first tart pan and found a simple recipe to try. After reading and re-reading the recipe, I proceeded to make the crust. To my disappointment, what came out of the oven was not a perfect looking deep tart crust. But a flat looking disc. What went wrong? Since I was making two tarts, one each for a different potluck, I poked holes in the next tart dough and made sure to carefully flatten out the center and make the sides thicker. The result, another disc of dough, but with a shallow crater in the middle. Defeat again! Well, fortunately the filling and the pretty fruit on top, made up for the crust's shortcomings. But I was left with the question, what did I do wrong?

It wasn't till recently that I realized I was baking blind. Which is baking a pie or tart shell without a filling inside. When you do that, you need to place something on top of the crust to make sure it doesn't puff up. Some people use tin foil and dry beans or pie weights. The recipe I used, did not mention this, which is why I was so confused. But this knowledge is obviously something an experienced baker would have known, therefore, it didn't need to be mentioned. Right?

On a different note, I had never arranged fruit on a tart before and was very pleased with how it turned out. It was fun to create a pattern with the different shapes and colors. However, after I added the glaze, (which was just a bit of apricot jam heated up and strained) I realized I left open too much empty space. For each area that the filling was not covered, the glaze settled and pooled, making it look messy. You can see this in the second tart picture. Solution: cover as much of the filling as you can with the fruit and do not add too much glaze. Or do not use a glaze. Omitting the glaze is fine if you're going to serve your tart soon. Or if you wait till right before serving to add it. If you don't, you run the risk of the fruit looking dry.

Now I'm accurately baking blind in the art of the tart.