Mini fruit tarts
These little fruit tarts are super cute and my recipe for crème pâtissière is absolutely foolproof to get smooth, thick, delicious vanilla custard.
Method
Pre-heat your oven to 180ºC.
First, make your pastry. Rub the flour and butter together between your hands until it resembles fine breadcrumbs, and stir through the icing sugar.
Add in the egg yolk and gently use your hands to bring it together into a dough. It should be enough, but if it seems too dry add in 1 teaspoon of cold water.
Wrap the pastry in cling film and put into the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
After chilling, break off portions of dough a bit bigger than a grape. You want them to be about 30g in weight. Mould these into the bottom and up the sides of your tart cases. A good way of getting them even and thin is to flour the outside of a spare case and press into the case you are filling. You should get about 10 cases from this amount of dough.
Use a fork to prick the bottom of each case a few times and whack them into your freezer for 10 minutes.
Put your frozen cases onto a baking tray and into your oven for 10 minutes until they are lightly golden brown, and set aside to cool.
Once cool, they should pop out of the cases easily. You might need to very gently squeeze the sides.
For the filling, slice the vanilla pod open lengthways and scrape out the seeds. Put the seeds, the pod and milk into a saucepan and bring slowly to the boil, stirring occasionally to prevent it from sticking. It’s very important that you bring the milk to a full boil.
Meanwhile, place the egg yolks, 125g of the sugar, and flour into a bowl and whisk together until the mixture is perfectly smooth and there is no flour visible. The flour needs to be completely incorporated.
Pour half the boiling milk over the yolk mixture, whisking constantly to prevent curdling. Once combined, pour into your saucepan with the remaining milk and bring back to the boil over a medium heat, whisking constantly. Once boiling continue whisking and let it boil for 30 seconds until the mixture is very thick.
Pass the mixture through a fine sieve into a bowl and place a sheet of cling film on the surface of the custard to prevent a skin forming. Leave the custard to cool, then refrigerate.
Once the custard is fridge cold, whip the cream and remaining 60g of sugar together until thick (if you hold the bowl upside down the cream shouldn’t fall out!) and fold into the chilled custard. You might think it won’t combine, but keep folding and you will result with a thick, soft custard.
Frankly, I could just eat the custard direct from the bowl, but to make the tarts add a heaped teaspoon of the custard into your pastry cases, and top with the fruit filling of your choice.
Finally warm the apricot jam in a saucepan until it is melted and runny. Use a pastry brush to paint paint over your tarts, glazing them.
Ingredients
Pastry
150g plain flour
75g cold butter, cut into cubes
50g icing sugar
1 egg yolk
Filling
1 vanilla pod
500ml whole milk
6 egg yolks
185g caster sugar
40g plain flour
150ml double cream
selection of summer fruits
3 tablespoons apricot jam
You will also need about 10 mini tart cases. There’s a link to the ones I use in the top tips below.
Top Tips
The tart cases I use can be bought here.
You will no doubt have a lot of custard left, you can freeze this into ice cream. Simply put into your freezer in a container with a lid and whisk every 30 minutes for 3 hours, returning to the freezer after every whisk. This prevents ice crystals forming.
