butter tarts

Here's my recipe for butter tarts. I use frozen pastry shells for the pastry because frankly I haven't got the time to start making pastry from scratch during the holiday season. Feel free to make pastry for these if you so desire and just line some muffin tins with the pastry and bake as follows.

Ingredients

2" frozen pastry shells( you can use large ones I just find that the 2" is the perfect pastry to filling ratio)
1-2 cups of Currants

3/4 cup of melted butter

1 1/4 cup of brown sugar

1 large egg

1 tbsp of vanilla extract

3 tbsp of cream

Preheat oven to 350f/180C

Put Frozen 2" pastry shells on a baking sheet, my package came with 40 shells and put 20 per baking sheet.

Take currants and sprinkle in pastry shells, approx 15 currants per shell or filled half way but with room with some breathing room around the currants

Melt butter and poor into a bowl whisk in brown sugar, egg, vanilla and cream.

Whisk until everything is well combined.

Poor filling into tarts till 3/4 full ( I used a tablespoon for this)

Bake for 10min or until the pastry is golden and the filling is hot and bubbling.

Place on cooling rack, until cool and as tempting as it is to pop one of these hot babies in your mouth you really must wait till they are cool! The middle is molten lava when it comes out of the oven, just a little tip from experience.

Finally enjoy, they won't last long!

Some wintery pics from our tree hunt.

november skies and peach pies

November darkness has descended upon us and I am now walking home from work in the dark. This certainly makes feel like hibernating, crawling into bed and not coming out till spring. But like with any season change there are new things to discover. On my walk home from work, I have discovered that houses really come into their own at night. Their occupants cooking dinner with windows open to release kitchen steam. These smells permeate into the quite streets, filling the cool air with the aromas of mashed potatoes, roasting chicken and warm cinnamon. The scents of autumn kitchens. Christmas lights have started to come on, giving a lovely ambiance to the streets, letting me drift into lovely thoughts of the upcoming Christmas season.

After all these inviting smells filling my head, I had strong desires to bake. But I was lacking energy and ingredients, so this is what I came up with. Easy peasy peach pie! I used a frozen pie crust witch I baked blind for 10 min. Then filled the crust with canned peaches and then made a custard filling. Poured that over the peaches and baked for 10 min at 400F and then turned it down to 300F for an hour. For the custard filling I combined in a bowl 2 large eggs, 1/3 cup of sugar, 6 tablespoons of butter, melted, 3 tablespoons of plain flour, 1 tablespoon vanilla and

1/4 teaspoon salt. Whisk together and pour over peaches. Easy peasy!

I have planted some paper whites with the anticipation of Christmas. It will be nice to have something blooming, fragrant and white on the window sill to see me over the holiday season. It's nice to watch their progression.

My new rocking chair, lovely for reading and knitting, tried to rock our 70lbs dogs in the chair but they were not amused.

Christmas magazines and books are a bit of a bad habit of mine, I just can't resist them!And finally Christmas sweeties! I can't wait for Christmas!