Cantonese Egg Tart 蛋挞（牛油皮底）

15.7.13 (Mon)

It has been some times since I baked egg tarts..Hubby always request me to bake the puff pastry-like（酥皮底） egg tarts..but I find that very troublesome, lots of work to do, esp in preparing the puff pastry..Lately, I found another interesting and useful blog on baking, Christine's recipe..Saw this egg tart recipe and prompted me to bake.

Ingredients

Crust

225g flour

125g butter

55g icing sugar

1 egg

Dash of vanilla extract

Custard

2 eggs

125ml hot water

70g caster sugar

75g evaporated milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
 

Methods

1. Crust: Place butter at room temperature until softened. Cream the butter and sugar with an electric mixer over medium speed until the mixture is smooth, fluffy and light in color. Add in whisked egg, half at a time, beat over low speed. Add vanilla extract, mix well. Sift in flour in two batches, scraping down the sides of the bowl between additions with a spatula, and make sure all ingredients combine well. Knead into dough.
Roll out the dough to a 1/2 cm thickness. Line dough in the middle of tart tins, one by one. Lightly press the dough with your thumbs, starting from the bottom then up to the sides. While pressing the dough, turn the tart tin clockwise/anti-clockwise in order to make an even tart shell. Trim away any excess dough. 

2. Custard: Add sugar into hot water, mix until completely dissolved. Whisk egg with evaporated milk. Pour in sugar water. Mix well. Sift egg mixture to get rid of any foam into a tea pot. Carefully pour egg mixture into each tart shell.

3. Preheat oven to 200C and bake for 10-15mins till the edges are lightly brown. Lower the temperature to 180C and continue to bake for another 10-15mins till the custards are cooked through. Just insert a toothpick into the custard. If it stands on its own, it's done.

Notes:

Placing tarts at the lower rack in oven could cook crusts easily before the egg custard being heated up too quickly. (My oven will automatically turn on the heater at the bottom when it turns to “bake mode”. It’s better to check the menu of your own oven and know how your oven is designed.)

At the very last stage, pull the oven door open a few inches. This method is to avoid custard from being puffed up too high. The custard would collapse once they are cooled down otherwise.

Make 14-16 egg tarts.