Jeanne: My first attempt at baking egg tarts!

I have to admit that I'm a total noob (a geek's term for novice) at baking, or even cooking for that matter. The only time i ever cooked was during Home Economics lessons in lower Secondary and wheni was living on exchange programs in USA and New Zealand. Even then, most of the cooking duties were shared between me and my roommate ( I was in  charge of cleaning the dishes and preparing the ingredients)!

When i was assigned baked products for F&N micro-teaching, the first thought that ran through my mind was, "I'm so dead." I couldnt believe my luck. Baking was one of my worst alomost non-existent cooking skills. But then i took it as a challenge to improve myself and a step to become a competent Home Economics teacher! Okay! Enough of my rambling and time to chart my battle with egg tarts!

Attempt 1:
I found this useful youtube video done by DessertzHouse so kudos to her!

Video 1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLAZEbm9L8M)

Her recipe is as follows:


Ingredients for butter pastry
100g of salted butter
200g of plain flour
1 normal sized egg
50g of sugar

Stpes for making butter pastry:
Pre-heat the oven to 160 degrees celcius
1) Mix butter to the flour and sugar mixture.
2) Add egg and knead it into a dough. Place the dough in the fridge for 10 minutes.
3) Gently press the pastry into the moulds wth your two thumbs. Try to keep the bottom thin
4) Poke holes into the pastry with a fork.

Ingredients for egg filling:
100ml of water
80g of sugar
3 normal sized eggs
100ml of fresh milk

Method for egg custard:
5) Pour water into a saucepan and mix in sugar. Wait for sugar to melt.
6) When the sugar mixture has cooled, add in milk and eggs, beat and mix well.
7) Sieve the mixture to get a smooth egg filling.
8) Pour the egg custard into the pastry moulds.
9) Bake it in the oven at 160 degrees celcius for 15-20 minutes. The custard should not be wobbly when u take it out of the oven.

Result:

Picture 1: Failure!!

As you can see from the picture, I forgot to sieve the egg mixture before I poured it into the moulds. Oh well lesson learnt!

Picture 2: 2nd batch from recipe 1

This time I sieved the egg mixture before poruing it into the moulds! Success! My food tasters commted that the pastry was too biscuity. But the egg custard was good and not too sweet!
Attempt 2:
Next, I tried out another recipe from a bloggers website. One of my fellow classmates tried the recipe out thus she recommended it to me. I modified the recipe alittle.

Recipe taken form: http://auntyyochana.blogspot.com/2006/09/egg-tarts.html

Ingredients for butter pastry:
125g of chilled Butter
60g of icing sugar
1/2 egg white
1 egg yolk
200g of plain flour
Ingredients for Egg Custard:
280g of fresh milk
160g of sugar
3 normal sized eggs

Method:
(1) For butter pastry: beat butter and icing sugar till well-mixed.
(2) Add in white and yolk and continue mixing.
(3) Add flour and mix into a dough. Rest for 10 mins in the fridge. Press dough into small tart moulds using your thumbs.
(4) Bake the tart shell till half-cooked. It should about 10 minutes at 175 degrees celsius.
(5) For egg custard, heat sugar and milk together. Turn off the heat once sugar dissolves.
(6) Lightly whisk eggs and pour into the milk mixture.
(7) Sift the egg custard mixture.
(8) Pour egg custard into the mould.
(9) Bake for 15-20 minutes. Monitor the tarts and remove from oven when it is no longer wobbly.

Result:

Picture 3

 This recipe made it harder to determine if the custards were cooked. Also, it required a longer time then if the tart and custard were baked together. This recipe also uses alot more sugar for the egg custard so it was too sweet. But the crust was better.
Conclusion:
I will modify the recipe and combine the two recipes. I will try using the butter pastry recipe from recipe 2 and the egg custard recipe from recipe 1. Also, I felt that the egg tarts tasted better after it was cooled in the fridge. The proportion of the ingredients also need to be scaled down as I'll be making mini egg tarts and so less ingredients will be needed.

Another question I have is...Do I really have to bake the tart and the egg custard separately? It seems less of a hassle to do both together like in recipe 1 and it was easier to determine if the egg tarts were ready to be removed from the oven. Egg tarts from both recipes tasted just fine to me. However, the lecturers seemed to imply that i have to bake them separately...Hmmmm....

Alrighty! That is all for today. Will upload more pictures and a finalised recipe when I have tried it out. I also need to decide if i want to use the food processor to make the dough and if so what steps i would need to take.

PS. Do provide feedback on how i can improve the crust of my egg tarts and which egg tart looks better. Thanks!