Egg Tarts

Egg tarts come in many variations .There are egg white tarts, milk tarts, honey-egg tarts, Pandan flavor tarts etc but the traditional one is the egg custard tarts which usually serve at dim sum place or at the Chinese Bakeries. These come in two kind of pastry. One which use the sweet short crust pastry and another one is the puff pastry kind. I made the traditional kind using short crust pastry. The custard filling is made out of eggs, milk, sugar and a bit of vanilla. The custard is soft and silky and it contrasted beautifully with the crispy crust. You can always change the filling to pandan, green tea or citrus flavor.

Ingredients for the Pastry

125 gm. butter
60 gm. icing sugar
1 egg yolk
200 gm. flour

Ingredients for Egg Custard

280 gm. fresh milk
110 gm. sugar
3 nos. eggs
1/2 tsp. vanilla essence

1. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degree F. Beat butter and icing sugar till well mixed. Add in the egg yolk and mix well.
2. Add in vanilla and then the flour and mix into a dough. If the dough mixture is a bit dry add a bit of cold water until the dough comes together. Rest the dough for 30mins. Roll out the dough and line the dough into small tart moulds.
3. Bake the tart shell till half-cooked. This will take about 10 min. The pastry should turn white and slightly brown on the edges. Remove from the oven. Turn the oven heat down to 325 degree F
4. For egg custard, heat sugar and milk together. Once sugar dissolves remove from heat Do not boil the milk.
5. Whisk eggs and pour into the milk mixture. Add in the vanilla.
6. Sift the egg custard and pour into tart shells and bake till egg custard sets.

Note : Check your tarts after 12-15 mins of baking. What you can do is to shake the tray of egg tarts and if the custard wobbles, then it a sign that it's not cook and if it doesn't wobble, then it's set and you can take it out from the oven.