Teensy-weensy Lemon Tarts

I totally adore the flavour of lemon, especially the zest. One of the best ways to get my fix is with a sweet, tart, buttery curd. It is delicious spread on toast with fresh ricotta, or as it appears here, spooned into bite-sized tart shells.

Lemon Curd
(care of Stephanie Alexander – The Cook’s Companion)
4 egg yolks
0.75 cup caster sugar
60g unsalted butter
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
100ml lemon juice

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar by hand until well combined and pour into a heavy-based non reactive saucepan. Add in butter, two heaped(!!) teaspoons of grated lemon rind and juice. Stirring constantly bring to simmering over a medium-high heat. This will take about five minutes. As soon as it starts to bubble, remove from the heat, continuing to stir for a minute or so. Allow to cool.

Pastry
120g soft butter
100g icing sugar
2 eggs
250g plain flour

Place butter and icing sugar in an electric mixer and beat until pale and creamy. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well. Stir in flour by hand until well incorporated and then bring crumbs together to form into a disc. Wrap pastry disc in plastic and refrigerate for a few hours (or freeze for half the time!).

Roll out pastry on a floured surface to a couple of millimetres thickness, and cut into circles. You want the circles to fit into whatever mould you have, in this instance, a mini muffin pan. My circles were about 7cm in diameter. Press well into the greased holes and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Now, these *should* be blind baked (i.e. lined with paper and filled with rice/beans). But they were just so tiny and I decided to hell with convention, and I just threw them in the oven at 180 degrees for about 10-12 minutes. If you choose to blind bake (good little chef now, aren’t you?), then bake blind for 7-8 minutes, remove paper and rice, and bake for a further 2-3 minutes. In either instance, take shells from the oven when they are golden and dry. Remove from pan and cool on a wire rack.

Assembly
Once both parts are cool, spoon curd into shells and flatten top with a spatula or knife. You can serve as is, but if you are handy with and have access to a kitchen blowtorch, sprinkle the top with caster sugar and brulee. Unfortunately I didn’t have access to one on this occasion, so I placed mine under the grill for a wee bit. The curd started to melt before the brulee set (dang), so I could only caramelise them momentarily. But with a blowtorch you can certainly get a much better effect, which I did daily when I was an apprentice pastrychef.