Lemon Custard Tarts

After attempting a previous lemon custard tart recipe, seen here, and not thinking it was amazing I decided to try making one of my own combining a few recipes and experimenting a little. 

The first step was to decide what type of pastry I wanted to use. I've had really good comments about my puff pastry but it's quite time consuming so I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the day making it. The other option was sweet shortcrust pastry. I decided that I would do puff this time because I wanted the recipe to be as good as it could be. The recipe for the pastry can be found here. Of course you can use shopbought pastry as well, either puff or shortcrust. 

I rolled out the pastry and, using a 9cm cutter, cut out circles. The custard recipe will make around 12 tarts. These were placed in a muffin tin, covered in greaseproof paper and filled with beans. I baked these, blind, for 15minutes. 180oC. 

Meanwhile I made the custard filling. I decided to do this similar to a previous recipe as that worked really well. For vanilla custard tarts with a chocolate swirl look here. I needed to be careful that the mixture didn't curdle, lemon and milk is not usually a good mix. 

For my first attempt, which didn't work, I tried adding lemon juice and zest in with the milk and heating it. I then strained it and thickened to custard. This mixture seperated and tasted awful so I won't be attempting that again!! 

My second attempt, which did work, was the method I settled on:

Ingredients: 

90g Caster Sugar

3 Egg Yolks

1 tbsp cornflour

250ml Semi skimmed milk

Zest of 2 lemons

Place the zest and the milk in a saucepan and heat up until the milk is just boiling. 

Mix together the sugar, egg and cornflour until a smooth paste. 

Strain the milk through a sieve, to remove all the lemon zest, and place it back in the saucepan. 

Add the paste and whisk, heat gently always mixing. This will start to thicken up quite quickly, as soon as it does remove it from the heat and allow to cool slightly. 

Lemon Custard

Once your pastry cases are cool, remove the paper and beans. Fill with the custard mixture. Place back in the oven, 180oC, for 10minutes. 

Tarts in the muffin tin

Once done allow to cool and enjoy!! 

Ready to eat!

The verdict: I really enjoyed these tarts, and it's not just because I made them up!! I thought the lemon was strong enough to have a fresh flavour but not so strong that it was over powering and sharp. The tarts had a lovely sweetness to them. I could happily have eaten the whole batch. I'm still not overly keen on pastry so for me I would probably make a big tart so there's a large custard to pastry ratio, however, I'm sure others would disagree with me on that one. I give the recipe 10/10! Yummy!! 

Chocolate Custard Tarts

I set about finding a custard recipe as I had left over egg yolks from the macaroons. I found this recipe on.. yep you guessed it.. the BBC food website. It can be found here. And this is the recipe I made the puff pastry for.

Once I'd made the puff pastry the next step was to roll it out and cut it to size. This recipe was for muffin size tarts to I cut the pastry using a 9cm cutter and placed these in a muffin tin. I then filled then with greaseproof paper and baking beans. This was then baked blind in the oven for 15 minutes. 

Pastry in the oven. 

Meanwhile I made the custard. Mix the egg yolks, sugar and cornflower in a bowl until it's a smooth paste. Set this to one side. Heat up the milk, with the vanilla pod and cinnamon stick, until boiling. Remove from the heat and add to the egg mix through a sieve. Mix this together and return to the heat. Stir continuously until the mixture is thick. 

Heat up the cream until about to boil. Remove from the heat and add the chocolate. Stir until melted and leave to cool slightly. 

Pour the custard into the cooled pastry cases. Add some chocolate into the centre and swirl in slightly. Cook the tarts in the oven for a further 10 minutes. 

Cooked tarts

The verdict: I really enjoyed these tarts, I thought the pastry was much better than shop bought and the custard also tasted really good. I could taste a subtle hint of cinnamon but fortunately Gary, who doesn't like cinnamon, couldn't. The cases rose slightly too much in the oven, the beans weren't heavy enough, so there wasn't as much custard as there could have been. This is a shame as more custard would have been nice. The chocolate mix was also a little thin, due to not using real chocolate, so next time I'd make that with real chocolate. The recipe was really easy to follow and I felt like I knew what I was doing through every step. I would certainly recommend these and I will be making them again. In fact I have left over pastry so most likely it'll be sooner rather than later. I give these 8/10. 

Puff Pastry

I have a variety of recipes to make today but I wanted to break them down a little bit because I'm learning new techniques as well as trying out new recipes. The first technique I'm learning is puff pastry. Now I don't want to give away what I'm using this for.. yet.. so you'll just have to wait and see.

Ingredients:
150g Strong White Flour
150g Plain Flour
2 Eggs
100ml Cold Water
250g Butter

I've never made puff pastry before but I've always seen it on programs and thought it looked like an interesting idea, very unhealthy though!! But one of my recipes this week called for this technique so I thought it was about time I mastered it.

The first step is to mix the flour, egg and water together. I was surprised to see this kind of pastry uses both plain flour but also strong white flour as well. Just as well I have a 25KG bag in my cupboard for bread!! This is meant to form a stiff dough, mine was more of a sticky mess:

Sticky dough.

But I wasn't too worried as the next stage was to knead it all together for 10 minutes. By the end of the 10 minutes by dough looked completely different and much more what I'd expect.

Smooth and elastic dough

It was then placed in a bag and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes to cool.

I bashed the butter, with a rolling pin until the block was a rectangle 1cm thick. This was the placed back in the fridge for an hour to harden.

Squashed butter

The pastry dough was then rolled out into a rectangle, also 1cm thickness. The size of the rectangle should be similar to that of the rolled butter, as you want the butter to go to the edges of the dough, 2/3 the size.

Place the butter on top of the dough on the bottom, it should be around 2/3 of the dough. Place as close to the edges as possible. Fold over the top 1/3 on top of the butter. Cut off the remaining butter and place on top of the folded edge. Fold over the bottom 1/3 on top of the butter. You now have a dough and butter sandwich.

Folded and wraped

Roll this into a rectangle again. Fold over the top 1/3 and then place the bottom 1/3 on top of this. Wrap this in cling film and then place in the fridge for an hour to chill.

Repeat this process 2 more times.

At this point the puff pastry is ready to use. 

Ready to use

This is a teaser of what I used the puff pastry for:

What are they? 

The verdict: I was very pleased at how my pastry rose and it looked like really good pastry. I'm not keen on pastry so I haven't tried it, as yet, but Gary says it tastes good. The recipe was very easy to use but it is a lengthy process taking several hours. I enjoyed making it and it's certainly something I'd consider making again rather than buying it.