Making Egg Tarts

This post goes out to Eeel who made a foodwish for egg tarts.

When I first started cooking I was purely a metric person, the reason simply being that it was more familiar and I liked the precision that comes with using a scale. It used to be a pain because a lot of recipes out there that I used as reference would use the US cup & spoon measurements and there would be a need for conversions and approximations - this got extremely tedious whenever I needed to make half the amount of the recipe.

Then one fateful day my scale broke, and on the shopping trip I went on to replace it, I saw a set of measuring cups and spoons dangling 4 feet up and no more than 3 feet away from where I was crouched down to retrieve a set of measuring scales (they always have them at the bottom shelves). I decided that maybe I should give it a try, and it all pretty much changed from there. Setting up ingredients became a lot easier and relatively fuss-free. That is, until I went to look for egg tart recipes. You should give it a try, and then you’ll see that 98% of the ones floating around are written in metric measurements. I didn’t think there’d be a day where I’d wish for a scale more, and so it was back to the good ol’ converter for today. I’m giving the amounts in the US measurements here, just for convenience sake, so I hope this will be helpful.

EGG TARTS:

[ 1 cup icing sugar + 3 cups all-purpose flour + 1 cup butter + 1 egg + a dash of salt + 2/3 cup sugar + 1 1/2 cup hot water + 8-9 eggs, beaten + 1 cup milk ]

In a medium bowl, mix together the icing sugar and flour.

Mix in butter with a fork or rub it into the flour with your hands until it resembles coarse crumbs.

Lightly whisk the 1 egg together with the salt.

Stir in the egg until the mixture forms a dough. The texture should be slightly moist. Add more butter if it is too dry, or more flour, if the dough seems greasy.

Divide the dough into 12-14 pieces and shape into 1 1/2 inch balls.

Using your thumb, press the balls into tart molds so that it covers the bottom, and goes up [preferably] higher than the sides (because these shells will shrink a bit when they cook).

A note about the tart molds: Ideally you should use the metal, disposable tart molds that will keep its shape. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any here and tried my luck with the quadrupled regular paper molds. If you’re stuck in the same predicament as me, then read on for modifications.

Use 2 fingers (or thumbs, in my case) to shape the edge.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C).

Combine the sugar and hot water in a measuring jug and stir until all the sugar has dissolved. Leave to cool for 1-2 mins. Stir in the milk and vanilla.

Add in the eggs and whisk to combine into the sugar-milk mixture.

Strain the filling through a sieve, and fill the tart shells.

If you’re using [quadrupled] paper molds, then take care not to overfill the tart shells. This will make the pastry unstable while cooking and result to custard run offs…

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes in the preheated oven, until golden brown, and the filling is puffed up a little bit.

like these. Ye have been warned.

To check whether or not your filling has set, do the toothpick test by sticking a toothpick to the middlemost part of the custard filling. If it stands up, then you’re good to go.

It is advisable to serve the egg tarts while they are piping hot from the oven. You will able to taste the crunchy crust with the soft moist egg custard fresh from the oven. The egg tarts can be kept in refrigerator up to 3 days.