Vivian's Groovy Strawberry Tart

As you may have noticed from my sidebar, I have joined a few baking challenges. The first of which is "Do You Want Pies With That?" Every month, a new theme is chosen and the challenge is to create a pies based on that theme. This month's theme is, "I Love That Movie!" Pick a movie you love and bake a pie based on that movie. Of course I love a lot of movies, but I really love "Pretty Woman."

Remember the scene early in the movie, when Edward (Richard Gere) takes Vivian (Julia Roberts) to his hotel room for the first time, and he orders champagne and strawberries? Vivian looks confused on what to do, and Edward tells her the strawberries bring out the flavor in the champagne, to which she replies, "Oh. Groovy."

So this pie is based on that scene. It's a strawberry tart with champagne whipped cream. I made a sweet tart crust (recipe from Baking From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan),

slathered the bottom with excellent quality strawberry preserves, and poured fresh strawberries on top, (all of this based on a recipe from the above Dorie Greenspan book - but I can't remember the name of the recipe right now - sorry!).

I used about 1 cup of champagne and put it on medium heat, letting it simmer until it had reduced to about half. To be honest, I'm not sure this was necessary, but it did seem to get rid of the bubbles (of course), and concentrate the flavor. I think you could easily use champagne flavoring, if it's out there (which I'm sure it is in the candy making world - I just didn't have time to look for it).

The only problem with this method is I was forced to drink the rest of the bottle of champagne so it wouldn't go to waste (maybe that's not really a problem).

To make the champagne whipped cream, I combined heavy cream, (about 1/2 pint), a little vanilla (about 1/2 teaspoon), and the reduced champagne (about 2 tablespoons) in my new whipped cream dispenser, and voila!

I will say it looks lovely, and tasted fantastic. My husband absolutely loved it. I'm sure if Vivian could taste it, she would think it was really groovy.