Wednesday 3 August 2011

Custard Tarts - cold, smooth, creamy and tart-like

I haven't cooked anything I felt like posting about recently, so in order to keep the food posts semi-regular I thought I'd post a picture of the last time I made custard tarts. I'm also going to post the subsequent "recipe" I sent my friend. Custard tarts are one of the best foods in the world. My rambled recipe which I am going to post with very little editing makes them sound a lot more complicated to make than they really are. Really, if you can make a half-decent sweet, short-crust pastry and custard, you can make custard tarts.
Not the prettiest picture. But it's the taste that counts.


recipe after the jump (slight language warning)

custard tarts!

The pastry:
Chill 160g of nutellex (I know not everyone chooses to use nutellex, but I do. Replace with something appropriate) and two tablespoons of water.
Mix about 2 tbs of soy milk with a small splash of apple cider vinegar (I don't think the type really matters actually) and leave it to curdle.
Get 300g of flour (plain, white) and 70g of castor sugar and also a pinch of tumeric if you want it to be a bit yellow
if you have a food processor put it in there with the dough mixing blade, otherwise a bowl is fine.
pulse/mix the nutellex with the dry stuff until it's breadcrumby, I think if you're doing it by hand, try to keep it as cold as possible.
add the milk and the water and process/mix until it is just formed into one lump
squash it a bit and wrap it up and put it in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.

the custard:
this is less exact because it's not based on a recipe.
put a fairly large amount of milk in a saucepan and get it warm
add some sugar and some maple syrup and a decent amount of vanilla essence/extract. also tumeric if you want yellow. get it hot.

in a small vessel mix some cornflour with a little milk and mix it up good and smooth. i think if you have say 2 cups of milk cooking then about 1/3 cup of cornflour might be enough.
when the cornflour paste is super smooth, make sure the saucepan milk is close to boiling then stir it real good while you pour in the cornflour, keep stirring or it makes really fucking gross chewy things.
as soon as it starts to boil turn it down to loooow. keep stirring until it is about as thick as what would be a bit too thick for normal eating custard, but not solid thick. If it doesn't seem to be getting thick enough just make more cornflour paste and add it in.

the tartenising:


roll the pastry to about 4mm thick or so and put it in some tart shaped things. leave a bit extra sticking up out of the top because it shrinks a bit.
put some weight on it, like pastry weights or a smaller dish and cook it until the pastry is cooked. After a bit you can take the weight off so the bottom cooks properly.

Let the custard cool a little, but not so it sets and gets heaps of skin. Pour the custard into the cooked pastries (then straight away rinse/soak your custard saucepan because it's a cunt to clean when the custard is all stuck on it.) and sprinkle on some cinnamon. Put them in the fridge and eat them when they are cold and creamy and delicious.

2 comments:

  1. Lol I love a recipe that tells you the saucepan is 'a cunt to clean' you're hired! I mean.... When I become a publisher - you're hired!

    ReplyDelete
  2. ha! Well, I look forward to your call ;)

    ReplyDelete

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