I love anything with custard - on it or in it, hot or cold... I've also been known to buy ready-made vanilla custard from a well-known supermarket and eat it out of the tub (while standing in front of the fridge with the door open...) Anyway...to be able to have homemade custard tarts at the click of my fingers is really one of life's greatest pleasures! These are super easy to make!
For this recipe, you'll need a 12-hole muffin tin, greased; a 9cm round cutter; baking beans or you can use rice/dry beans.
Pre-heat your oven to 180ºc Fan, once the pastry has chilled for an hour.
Ingredients
For the pastry
125g Unsalted Butter
55g Golden Caster Sugar
Pinch of Salt
1 Medium Size Egg
200g Plain Flour
For the custard
3 Large Size Egg Yolks
40g White Caster Sugar
300g Whole Milk
Nutmeg
How I make my Custard Tarts
First, make the pastry. Cream together the butter, sugar and salt. Add the egg and whisk until you get a mayonnaise type consistency (i.e., creamy and silky). Add the flour and fold together gently until combined. Wrap up, flatten the pastry into a disc and chill in the fridge for an hour.
Flour your worktop and roll out your pastry (keep adding flour as you go so it doesn't stick to your roller or worktop) and cut out 12 discs. I used a 9cm cutter. Put the pastry discs into your greased muffin tin and chill in the freezer for 10 minutes. In the meantime, pre-heat your oven to 180ºc Fan.
Blind bake your pastry cases. To do this, I used a muffin/cupcake paper case on top of each pastry disc and added ceramic baking beans to each. If you don't have cupcake cases you can used baking parchment and substitute rice or beans for the ceramic beans. Make sure you fill the beans to the top of each pastry case.
Bake the pastry for 15-20 minutes with the beans; I then removed the beans and popped the pastry back into the oven for a few more minutes to brown. Once you take the pastry out of the oven, turn your oven down to 140ºc Fan.
Now make the custard. You need to do this all as one activity so don't be tempted to do it in-between jobs! Mix together the egg yolks and sugar in a jug that's easy to mix in and also makes it easy for pouring your custard later; it's important to mix these as soon as they come together otherwise the sugar will start to 'cook' the eggs. Next, place your milk in a pan and bring it to the boil. Pour it onto the egg mixture and mix together well.
Carefully (and I mean slowly and carefully!) pour your custard mixture into the pastry cases. Be careful not to spill any down the sides of the pastry and do not overfill the cases. Grate some nutmeg over each custard and carefully put the tin back into the oven and bake for c.20-22 minutes. You still want a wobble but it's also important that the custard is cooked. If you have a thermopen, you're looking for 82º-84ºc.
Leave to cool in the tin. I hate this part as I have no patience for cooling. I just want to eat them straight away! And also warm custard tarts... drool-fest!
Goes really well with a nice cup of tea.
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