Pineapple Tarts

My baking mood is ON. After baking pandan chiffon cake and dates & ginger stickies, my next target was pineapple tarts.

Pineapple tarts are very popular in Malaysia especially during Chinese New Year. I remembered when it's near Chinese New Year, my mum will buy a lot of pineapples to cook the pineapple jam from scratch. Cooking the pineapple jam taking a long time, especially when you have to keep stirring it, and I am sometimes the victim to help my mum stirring it under the heat.

Since this Chinese New Year I didn't get to eat the yummy pineapple tarts made by my mum. I took the opportunity to bake it on one of the Sunday. At first, I only have the intention to cook the pineapple jam from scratch on Sunday. But since after done with the pineapple jam, I decided to continue baking the pineapple tarts on that day itself.

My partner helped me with the baking. It took us about an hour to get everything done. By the time it is done, it's already about 8pm. Everything turns out to be great. Before that, my partner keep teasing me to just buy the shortcrust pastry and pineapple jam since it is widely available here. But I kept insisting to make everything by myself as I believe it will taste better and also I can make it to my liking.

When my partner tasted the pineapple tarts that we had made, and he finally agrees that making it ourselves turns out to be good. And making shortcrust pastry is so easy and it taste so much better as compared to the ready made ones. This is because the ready-made shortcrust pastry is made of margarine instead of butter. That is the biggest difference.

Below are the pineapple recipe that I had made earlier just in case you need it.

Pineapple Tarts Recipe

Make: +- 30pcs

Jam Ingredients

+-1.2 kilograms whole pineapples  (without skin on)

+-150 grams rock sugars

3 cloves

1/2 lemon juice

Methods:

1. Remove the core of the pineapple and grate coarsely.
2. Cook the grated pineapple with the pineapple juice in a pan.
3. Add in the cloves and rock sugar into the pan. You can adjust the amount of sugar as according to your sweetness liking.
4. Cook the grated pineapple until it is almost dry. Constantly stirring until the mixture is dry over low heat.
5. Add in the lemon juice and continuing stirring the mixtures until it is dry. Then remove from heat and set aside to cool.

Pastry Ingredients

150 grams plain flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoon corn flour

100 grams butter

1 1/2 icing sugar

1 egg yolk

Methods

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degree Celcius.

2. Sieve plain flour, corn flour, salt and icing sugar into the mixing bowl.

3. Rub in the butter into the mixture until it looks like bread crumbs.

4. Then add in the egg yolk into the mixtures to form a dough.

5. Roll pastry into about 0.7cm thickness and stamp out with a cutter. Press about 0.25 deep in the centre of the pastry. 

6. Add in about a teaspoon of pineapple jam.

7. Lastly you can decorate the tart with two strips of pastry placed to make a cross on the top.

8. Bake in a preheat oven at 180 degree Celcius for 10 to 15 minutes or until golden brown.