Portuguese custard tarts

Portuguese custard tarts
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These little Portuguese custard tarts are light, perfect for entertaining, be careful, they fly away! To make them, just use your larger size muffin trays!

Ingredients

  • 1 quantity of puff pastry – about 250 g, the recipe is covered separately if you are ready to give it a go.
  • 1 egg
  • coarse raw sugar
  • 1 quantity of crème patissiere
For the crème patissiere:
  • 1/2 L of milk
  • 4 eggs yolks
  • vanilla essence or seeds from a vanilla bean
  • 60 g of plain flour
  • 60 g of white sugar

Another version of creme patissiere (used as much as the previous one, it is a matter of taste) contains cornflour (maizena).  The method is exactly the same, using the cornflour instead of the flour.  This recipe call for 40 g of butter to be added at the end outside of the fire, just before transferring to the container.  It gives it a nice finish taste (richer).  For this version, use 1/2 L of milk, 1/2 vanilla pod or good quality vanilla extract, 60 g corn flour, 100 g sugar, 100 g egg yolks, 40 g butter.

Method

For the crème patissière:

  1. Bring to the boil the milk and vanilla
  2. In the meanwhile, beat the egg white, sugar and flour together
  3. Pour a little milk over the egg mix while continuously mixing, then slowly pour back all of that mix in the saucepan with the remaining milk still mixing and cook on a slow fire. the mix will thicken.  Remove when it starts to boil.
  4. Pour into a plastic container and cover with a plastic film directly on top of the custard to avoid the forming of a skin.
  5. Cool quickly.

For the tartlets

  1. Warm the oven up on 180°C
  2. Roll the puff pastry to about 3 mm thick, you will need to use a little flour to prevent from sticking
  3. Cut squares to fit into a hole of your muffin tray (no need to butter the tray, there is already plenty butter in the puff pastry! it will not stick.)
  4. Place the squares at the bottom of the holes
  5. Fill with crème patissiere almost to the top
  6. Beat the egg in a bowl with 1 tablespoon of water (or about), use a brush to brush the edges of the pastry with the egg-wash (do not egg wash the crème patissiere)
  7. Sprinkle a little coarse raw sugar over the egg wash
  8. Place in the oven, cook until golden brown on the edges about 20 minutes
  9. Remove from the oven, turn the muffin trays over a cooling rack, the tartlets will pop out, some may need a bit of help, let them cool down.

Enjoy!