Custard Tart

By the time the summer rolled around, I'd had a decent amount of practice making shortcrust pastry (I'd basically made a LOT of treacle tarts), so I finally decided to have a go at making an old family favourite: the custard tart. Once again, I turned to the BBC Food website, and after some searching I came across an intriguing recipe, this Honey and Date Custard Tart by James Martin. Now I'm not the biggest fan of dates, so I decided to leave them out, and just have the honey. Using the same shortcrust pastry from The Crazy Kitchen's Lemon and Ginger Tart recipe, I made my usual pastry case, and then moved onto making the custard filling. This is actually a fairly simple filling to make, the main thing to watch out for is burning the cream when you boil it. I got lucky with it this time, but I get the feeling that it could be just a matter of seconds between just-boiling cream and burnt cream.

After whisking the boiling cream into the egg yolk and honey mixture, I carefully poured the filling into the pastry case and then gingerly transferred it to the oven. 20 minutes later, this was the result:

Slightly over-done, but still tasty.

The only problem here was the fact that the tart filling was slightly overdone. In my desperation to get the custard set, I'd left the tart in the oven about five minutes too long. However, the flavour was not compromised, and I loved the honey flavour that came with this custard filling.

Despite the relative success of the honey custard tart, I really wanted to make a traditional custard and nutmeg tart. Using the same James Martin recipe, I simply left out the dates again, and substituted the honey with 50g caster sugar, put in a few drops of vanilla essence, and added half a teaspoon of nutmeg into the custard mix. Once the filling had been poured into the pastry case (made following The Crazy Kitchen recipe yet again!), I then sprinkled yet more nutmeg over the top to give the custard tart that traditional look. This time I timed the bake perfectly, and the custard was beautifully done, with a beautiful hint of nutmeg and vanilla.

Yummy custard tart.

As you can probably see, the pastry was very thin (not necessarily a bad thing), which meant that there were a couple of cracks in the side of the case that appeared when I moved the tart from the wire-rack to the plate. This is a common issue for me, but I'd rather have a thin and crispy pastry than one that is too thick and stodgy.

This has become one of my favourite recipes to make, and was even requested by my parents when I went to stay with them for Christmas. This time I made excellent use of the leftover pastry scraps, rolling them out and making custard tartlets along with the main tart.

A family of custard tarts.

I must say, they all went down very well with my parents; it's always nice to hear that my parents like your baking (they'd experienced my poor cooking skills in the past, and have been pleasantly surprised by my baking renaissance), and it's particularly gratifying to hear that they liked my version of a long-time family favourite. That makes it one of my proudest baking successes in my mind.

Beckie.