A lot of pineapple goes into pineapple tarts!

Another Chinese New Year favourite that you simply can’t go without. I have never made pineapple tarts before and there are quite a few different variations of the recipe online. In the end I decided to take my favourite parts from the recipes of A Spoonful of Sugah, Rasa Malaysia and Fresh From the Oven.

The pineapple balls in the photo above are the result of boiling down 3 cans of pineapple (yields approximately 45 small balls).

I used a mini flower shaped cutter to cut out the pastry base. These are smaller than usual pineapple tart cutters and I got about 30 bases from the amount of pastry that I made.

RECIPE

For the pineapple jam

3 cans of pineapple

10 tbsp caster sugar

2 inch piece of cinnamon stick

2-3 cloves

2 segments of star anise

For the pastry

170g plain flour

10g cornflour

120g salted butter

1/4 egg

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 tbsp icing sugar

The method can be found here. 

I actually halved the pastry ingredients to account for the fact that the original recipe calls for 3 whole fresh pineapples and I only used 3 cans of pineapple which I guessed equated to about 1.5 pineapples. I did have a little bit of the pineapple jam left over at the end so the yield could probably have been higher.

Another thing I would do differently next time is to roll the pastry a little thinner as it seemed to expand slightly in the oven which made the pastry slightly too thick.

Some handy tips:

• If you have time before and after blending the pineapple, try to squeeze as much of the juice out as possible. This will cut down the time needed to reduce the pineapple and will also make the jam easier to roll into balls.
• Keep a close eye on the pineapple and stir often towards the end of the reducing process as this is when there is very little liquid in the pan and the pineapple could quickly burn.
• Double egg-washing the tarts, once before baking and once half-way through, will make the pastry even more golden.

I would say that these pineapple tarts need a bit more practice. They’re nowhere near professional looking, and I think the recipes could be refined a bit. I found that the pineapple jam was not quite sweet enough, and the pastry, whilst buttery and almost melt-in-the-mouth, was just that little bit dry. Keep your eyes peeled for take 2 of the pineapple tarts.

In the meantime I’d love to know what are your experiences of making pineapple tarts and whether you have a foolproof recipe you wouldn’t mind sharing :)

Craving a bit of Chinese New Year

It’s so sad that Chinese New Year in the UK is a bit of a non-event. Aside from the usual Sunday celebrations in Chinatown, we don’t have the opportunity to go visiting family, and this year our reunion dinner has been postponed until Saturday. I miss Singapore in the run-up to Chinese New Year, old aunties queuing to buy dried mushrooms and lap cheong, the drumming of lion dance troupes in their open backed trucks rushing to their next performance and the choruses of “lo hei!” echoing from surrounding apartments.

So in an attempt not to miss out on all the CNY fun I decided to try my hand at making one of my favourite CNY snacks, cashew nut cookies, from this recipe courtesy of ‘My Kitchen Snippets’.

The dough uses a mixture of plain flour and cornflour and lots of butter. When I first started mixing it seemed as though there would be too much butter to combine well, but after a fair amount of kneading the mixture came together and was actually quite crumbly and dry, as I expected it would be.

The recipe didn’t specify the size of each cookie, but as the dough was quite dry I decided to make them small (less than 1 inch across).

I decided to apply the egg wash twice, once before putting them into the oven and again  just over halfway through cooking. I found that this gave them a much more even, golden colour.

The result was a delightfully crumbly, buttery biscuit bursting with cashew nut flavour. One thing I would wish is for the biscuit to be slightly sweeter, for next time I think I would add another 50-70g of sugar. However all in all these cookies are very close to the shop bought ones which I would always ask relatives to bring from Singapore for me. :)