Pineapple Tarts

It's a few more weeks before Chinese New Year and you can easily find lot of New Year Cookies all around Singapore. Out of those cookies, Pineapple Tart is one of the most famous one among all. And since I have a packet of pineapple paste sitting in the fridge, I decided to do a test run on this recipe before making them in batches for friends and relatives.

This recipe is from one of the mum's in M4M website but I modify the ingredients a bit to suits our preference. The pineapple tart is more towards the "melt in mouth" version which is more buttery and melt instantly when put into your mouth.




Ingredients Pastry Dough:
300g Plain Flour
40g Milk Powder
1.5 Tablespoon Icing Sugar
250g Cold Butter, cubed
1 Egg Yolk, lightly beaten
½ Teaspoon Vanilla extract
1 Beaten Egg, for glazing

Methods:
1. Put sieved flour, milk powder and icing sugar in a mixing bowl.
2. Rub in butter until mixture resembles breadcrumbs. (must be fast or else the butter will melt and the dough will became very soft)
3. Beat in egg yolk and extract.
4. Mix well to form a dough. Place in a plastic bag and chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
5. Roll pastry out to 0.5 cm thickness on a lightly-floured tabletop and cut out rounds with a tart cutter.
6. Glaze the tart based with beaten egg then fill each piece of cut-out pastry with pineapple jam filling.
7. Cut thin strips of pastry to form a lattice on top of each tart.
8. Preheated oven to 180°C and bake the tarts for 15 minutes.
9. Reduce the temperature to 170°C and continue to bake for another 5 minutes or until golden.
10. Remove and cool tarts on a wire rack before storing in air-tight containers.

Notes:
- This is a very soft dough, so do consider to divide it into a few portions and keep the unused portion in the fridge while working with 1 portion
- Alternatively you can flour the dough with some extra flour and work fast with the cutter, cut out all the tarts base first then brush with beaten egg and top with prepared pineapple fillings.
- Pineapple paste get be obtained from local supermarkets or baking stores such as Phoon Huat, Sunlik and etc. Roll the paste into small cherry size balls and place them in plastic container first before making the dough.