Jam Tarts

So, I managed to make good pastry with my mum and a food processor, but now it’s time to do it myself and by hand. The Good Food: Easy Baking Recipes book suggested that I use pre made pastry, and Lorraine Pascale only had a complicated recipe involving eggs in her book. So I decided that I knew what I was doing and just went for it.

Recipe

110g Butter

225g Plain Flour

Water

Strawberry Jam

Method

First I rubbed together the flour and the butter. I decided that I knew pastry needed to be cold so I used butter straight out of the fridge. The rubbing together seemed to take ages and eventually I was making everything into more blobs not less. So I decided to start adding the water. I stirred everything together with a metal spoon (as I thought I had heard something about that too). In the end the mixture turned out a bit sticky so a little more flour was added. It was at this point that I began to worry. The dough was very pale and looked and felt more like bread than pastry. It was also suspiciously stretchy.

After resting in the fridge for 20mins I started to roll it out. It still wasn’t right but I decided that I might as well see how it worked out. The dough was very light and I have to admit you could still see some smears of butter in it. I was going to try out all sorts of different jams in my tarts but I went with plain strawberry so as not to confuse things further. I filled my normal 12 hole bun tin so also made some mini tarts.

I then put a small amount of strawberry jam on top of each “pastry” case. After 15 minutes in the oven the tarts were ready to be taken out of the oven and set to cool.

Results

I think these weren’t the complete disaster I was predicting but they weren’t far off either. I have managed to create some kind of slightly flaky, fairly chewy approximation of shortcrust pastry. But I am pretty sure where I went wrong. First you do need softer butter so that it takes less time to rub in. To be honest I knew I didn’t get breadcrumbs like I should have. Second I need to take more time and be more careful with adding the water. For this bake my usual slapdash, relaxed approach isn’t the best. So, there will be a lot more jam tarts in the making to perfect this one…

Score: 2/10 (Because I can’t bear to give a 1, and as a whole they are ok, just not as what they should be like.)

Soundtrack: Hands, Little Boots