Joe Anderson Our Eat and Tweet style Custard Pie is made using a shortbread pastry and it tastes awesome.
Before getting started pre-heat the oven to 180c and grease a 12 hole muffin tray with butter (I use a deep muffin tray similar to this one, to stop anything overflowing).
Custard Tart Pie – EatandTweet Style
For the shortbread:
- 200g plain flour
- 75g caster sugar
- 175g butter, softened
- 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
- 50g Cornflour
Method
Making the shortbread is simple really. Just mix together the butter, flour, cornflour and sugar until a dough is formed. If the mixture is crumbly then simply add a little water. Once you have a dough roll it out onto a flat, floured surface until it is around 3cm thick and find a round cutter which is slightly larger than the holes in your muffin tray. Dust with flour and cut out one piece of shortbread with an 11cm cutter and place it into the hole. It should fit in almost like a pasty/pie shape, with a hollow middle. It’ll probably fill around half the hole, this is perfect.
Repeat until you have the shortbread mix in all 12 holes. As mentioned, there should be space in the middle of the mixture to hold your filling, but for now you’ll need to blind bake these shortbread pasties by placing some greaseproof paper in the middle of each.
I place a paper fairy cake case into the empty pastry disc and fill it with baking beans, as they seem to be a perfect fit, stopping the pastry from rising in the oven.
Bake for around 10 minutes then remove the paper cases and baking beans and then bake for another 5 minutes or until cooked in the middle.
Remove them from the muffin tin but keep that to once side. Once cooled, you should now have a shortbread pastry case which is ready to be filled with custard.
For the custard filling:
- 700ml/1¼ pint full-fat milk
- 7 free-range egg yolks
- 90g/3¼oz caster sugar
- Nutmeg
Once you have prepared the tarts, heat the milk in a saucepan. Then mix the sugar and egg yolk together, separately from the milk, until you have a creamy mixture. Then you can slowly add this mixture to the heated milk until you have small bubbles form.
Next, transfer the custard to a jug and fill the pastry as high as you can. Some will evaporate in the oven, so get as close to the top as you can. Sprinkle on some nutmeg and bake for 25 minutes.
Leave to cool so that they are easy to remove from the tin and then store in the fridge. If you are having issues removing them from the tin you can always put them in the freezer and knock them out later.
