Millionaire’s shortbread may not seem to be very Christmas-y at first glance. However, the original shortbread very much is in Scotland, where this delicious biscuit originates from. And as the famous cook, Mary Berry says

At Christmas you must indulge yourself.

The history of the shortbread

The history of the shortbread goes back to the 12th century when it was made of leftover bread. At the time it wasn’t much of a biscuit we know today: it was hard, not sweet and there was nothing luxurious about it and it was called biscuit-bread.

The recipe changed in the 16th century when the yeast was left out and butter added to the dough making it an expensive treat. The term “short” refers to the crumbliness of the biscuit and pastry and this is why the fat at added to biscuits and pastries is called shortening.

Shortbread today is sweet, however Mary Queen of Scots for example was fond of shortbread with carraway. Later on shortbread was made with different flavourings by adding raisins, cranberries or later lemon. In the 19th century shortbread was also topped with orange peel and almonds.

Traditionally, shortbread has three different forms: small round, petticoat tails or fingers. The name petticoat tails doesn’t come from the French petites gatelles (“little cakes”), as is often believed — even though Scottish cooking had closer ties to French cuisine than to English food during the reign of Mary Queen of Scots. Instead, the term originates from petticoat tallies, referring to the triangular pattern used to craft the bell-shaped hoop petticoats worn by figures such as Elizabeth I.

Millionaire’s shortbread

The Millionaire’s shortbread is not that old though. Shortbread was first topped with caramel in the 1950s, and with caramel and chocolate in 1972. The recipe of the latter was first published in the Scottish Association of Young Farmer’s Clubs Recipes book. I think, millionaire shortbread is very close to the Twix chocolate bar which was launched by Mars in 1967. Not sure if this inspired some to make what we today know as millionaire’s shortbread.

Why is it called Millionaire’s shortbread?

I would think because its rich ingredients and also the fact that butter and sugar were luxury ingredients centuries ago (well, butter is becoming a luxury these days, too, I may add).

Plus it’s really rich. Rich in calories! 🙂

INGREDIENTS

(for a 17 x 28cm baking tray)

For the shortbread:
100g salted butter
50g caster sugar
150g plain flour

For the caramel:
200g condensed milk
150g salted butter
50g caster sugar
50g Golden syrup

200g dark or milk chocolate

To make the shortbread, mix the flour and sugar in a bowl. Add the butter and rub together with your fingertips until the mixture is just beginning to bind together. Knead only until the mixture forms a smooth dough.

If the butter melted too much, place the it into the fridge to chill for a while. Then press the dough evenly in the tin and prick all over with a fork.

Bake it for 10 minutes at 160C or until it is just blushing golden brown at the edges.

The shortbread must be cool when the caramel is poured on the top.

For the caramel, put all ingredients into a saucepan and place on medium-high heat. Make sure you’re stirring it gently until you reach the desired colour. When ready, pour the caramel onto your biscuit base. To even out the surface, pick up the tin and drop it onto the table with a bang. Leave this to cool for a few hours (or overnight) before adding the chocolate topping.

Melt your choice of chocolate either in a microwave or in a bowl over steaming water and pour it onto the caramel. Again, to level the layer, pick up the tin and drop it onto the table. I prefer using dark chocolate but milk chocolate works well, too.

Leave it to set for at least an hour but never put it into the fridge.

Heat a knife with hot water to slice the shortbread. I prefer squares, but you can be as creative as you like. Voi la!

Enjoy!

Advent is such a special time of the year with all the Christmas preparations: baking, shopping, creative gift-making.

Making Millionaire’s shortbread is easy and success is guaranteed among those with sweet-tooth. It can be a nice gift for someone, too.

I threw a picnic in our garden the other day. We were busy with all sorts of things, so it seemed to be a good idea to have a picnic as our lunch. It saved me from having to cook something and we also saved time as we didn’t have to travel anywhere. So we just enjoyed the good weather and relaxed for a while.

Interestingly enough, we enjoyed it big time in spite of being in our own garden. And as we enjoyed all the food, I recalled a You rang, M’lord? episode.

“A Day In The Country” – that was the title of the episode when Lord Meldrum took his staff for a picnic so that he could meet Lady Agatha who equally organised a day out for their staff as a treat. Lord Meldrum’s cook, Mrs Lipton packed a scrumptious picnic packed in several wicker baskets that took several turns to get to the car. The hall boy, Henry made a comment:

“It’s funny to take so much stuff just to eat on the grass. We could take it only to the front garden.”

Actually, Henry had a point.

I then also recalled Queen Victoria in the film Victoria and Abdul where she points at a spot on a hilltop in stormy winds choosing the perfect spot where she wants to have the table set for a picnic.

It appears that picnics were loved by the upper class, however eating outdoors wasn’t the privilege of the wealthy.

Eating outdoors

Eating outdoors have always existed: think about the huntsmen on horseback who got their lunch taken to them, or about day-labourers who had their packed lunch out in the fields. The Cornish pasty which was designed so that miners could have it still warm and by using their dirty hands, could also be mentioned.

These outdoor meals, however, could not be called picnic yet. Even outdoor feasts during the renaissance period that were enjoyed by aristocracy – In England that would have been desserts consumed in the so called banqueting house in the garden- wouldn’t count as picnic.

Although the picnic we know today appears to be very English, in reality it has French roots. The word “pique-nique” dates from 1692 when in the book of Origines de la Langue Française it describes a group of people dining in a restaurant who brought their own wine. The word also refers to an indoor meal where everybody contributed with a dish.

How the picnic got to Britain

The French Revolution played a key part in the picnic coming to Britain. French aristocracy fled to England where they carried on with their traditions. The London Pic Nic Society founded in 1801 by French settlers asked members to bring a dish and six bottles of wine to their theatre and dining events.

Eating outdoors as a pastime became fashionable and the word picnic became common in English in the mid-19th century. The romantic movement played a role in it as they encouraged people to get out and about and to explore outdoors. The upper class escaped the formality of the dining room and had their lunch outside with a beautiful natural scene in a background.

The heydays of the English picnic

Picnics became very fashionable during the Victorian era, albeit still among the upper class at first. Women’s magazines offered practical tips as well as menus for picnics along with picnic etiquette. The iconic wicker basket was introduced during this period as well.

Picnic was so popular that it made its way to the social calendar of the upper class: there was picnic before events like the Henley Royal Regatta, Royal Ascot or the Glyndebourne Opera. The tradition is still alive.

With the rapid expansion of the rail network, with cars and motorbikes being more accessible, the middle and working class could get around and travel easier. So a day in the country with a packed lunch or picnic wasn’t the treat of the upper class anymore.

Picnic today

Although not necessarily, but for me the English picnic also means croquet and quoits or other garden games. Even today you can see picnic tables set by the cricket pitch on village greens.

The picnic basket can contain any type of food, however, for me the below are essential part of the picnic menu.

• Salad
• Pork pie, sausage roll, Scotch egg
• Bread and butter
• (Finger) sandwiches
• Cocktail sausages
• Lemonade
• Custard tart or jam tarts
• Strawberries

Any setting is lovely for a picnic: it could be in the garden of a gorgeous estate, by the river, on the beach, in the woodlands or on top of a hill, or even in our own garden.

As Henry suggested in “Your rang, M’ylord?” I only carried the food to our garden.

Funnily enough we thoroughly enjoyed our picnic and the food somehow tasted much better outdoors… So consider having a picnic in your garden every now and then. Trust me, you’ll love it.

With love,

With Christmas approaching it’s nice to bake something really Christmas-y. This year I chose to bake something I’ve never baked before: a bundt cake. A Christmas cranberry bundt cake.

For this I used a classic baking tin by Nordic Ware, something I’ve wanted for such a long time. The tin is excellent and when used properly i.e. greasing with butter and sprinkling with flour, the cake just falls out of the tin when ready.

Baking is always a joy, but baking at Christmas is special. The best thing about baking Christmas cakes is that the house smells like Christmas.

Ingredients for a 1400ml tin

170g fresh cranberries
200g flour (gluten free would work as well)
180g softened butter
170g sugar
1 pinch of salt
½ tsp vanilia paste
3 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 tbs mixed spice
1 tbs ground cinnamon

For the glaze:

200g icing sugar
2 tbsp milk
Sugared cranberries and fresh rosemary

Sugared cranberries

For the decoration you can prepare the sugared cranberries the day before you bake the cake.

First make a sugar syrup by using same amount of water and sugar. I used 100ml water for 100g sugar.

Boil the water with the sugar until the sugar is completely melted. Leave it for 10 minutes to cool down.

Put the washed fresh cranberries to the syrup and let them soak for a few minutes.

Remove the cranberries and leave them on a baking rack to dry a little.

Put some sugar on a plate and roll the sticky cranberries in the sugar until they are all coated.

Now on to the cranberry bundt cake.

First grease the tin with butter and sprinkle it with flour. Then put the mold to the fridge.

Pre-heat the oven top and bottom heat function to 170C.

Mix the butter with the sugar and vanilla paste until the mix is fluffy. Then add the eggs, one at the time and mix it for 30 seconds.

Now mix the dry ingredients: the flour, spices, baking powder and pinch of salt. Once mixed, add half of it to the wet mixture and mix it well. Then add the rest of the flour and mix.

Put a few tablespoons of batter to the mould and smear it to the side of the tin. This will help to keep the cake’s surface intact from the cranberries.

Now add the fresh cranberries to the batter and mix.

Pour the batter into the mold and bake it for 35-45 minutes. Use a toothpick or a meat pin to chcek if the cake is baked. Once the toothpick comes out clean, it’s ready.

Remove the cranberry bundt cake from the oven and leave it for a few minutes in the mould to cool down, but not too long as the cake will bake further in the hot mould and it may dry out.

Turn the cake out of the tin onto a cooling rack and leave it to cool down completely.

The glaze

Make the glaze. You can use milk or any liquid of your choice: wine or a fruit juice. I used milk and icing sugar. I started with 100g icing sugar and a tablespoon of milk. Depending how much glaze and consistency you’d like, you may need another 100g of icing sugar and some more milk. Add the milk gradually as the icing sugar doesn’t take up much liquid, meaning the glaze can be quite thin.

Once you got the right consistency, pour it onto the cake and decorate it with the sugared cranberries and fresh rosemary.

It’s best serving the cake when it’s fresh, but it can be stored for a few days.

Enjoy your Christmas Cranberry Bundt Cake.

Summer spoils us with great choices of fresh flowers – whether in wildflower meadows, in our gardens or in our vases as cut flowers.

For years dried flowers always reminded me of autumn. But not anymore. When selected carefully, dried flower arrangements and wreaths can bring gorgeous summer vibes to your house.

My first ever dried flower wreath

I’ve been admiring dried summer flower wreath for some time and I wanted to make myself one. I also decided to share a step-by-step tutorial how to make a dried flower wreath at home.

The process

First I had to find out what colour scheme I wanted to go for. As you appreciate the choices of different dried flowers are almost endless.

Whereas I quite like vibrant colours, I wanted to create a white-beige-light brown-pale yellow coloured wreath which reminds me of daisies by the wheat field in the summer sunset.

Once I purchased the dried flowers, I first laid them all out to see what all I had. Then I started to make small bunches, four different types to vary the flowers properly and so that I can have some repetitive pattern.

Tip: make a bunch where you have a longer stem like a wheat sticking out so that it can give you that swirl effect in the wreath.

Make sure you also make like thicker filler bunches without the feature flower to fill gaps.

Once all my bunches are ready (I made 30-35 in total for my 20cm diameter straw base), I started to assemble the wreath.

I started with two different bunches with a feature flower and I placed them in a V-shape on the base and fixed them with a wire.

I then used another 2 bunches in the same way and finally a fifth bunch which was a “filler” bunch. This all together made up a good section (almost a quarter) of my wreath.

I repeated the process until the wreath was complete and I finished it off with an ivory silk ribbon.

The result

I must admit I had to disassemble the wreath a few times because I ran out of bunches. I had to calculate and arrange the bunches more economically in order to fully cover it.

Whereas I’ve been making Christmas wreaths for more than 20 years and I’m quite comfortable with them, this was the first time I made a dried flower wreath. Making a dried summer flower wreath is not the same, however, I’m sure it’s just a question of practicing and next time it’ll go much better.

Anyway, I’m happy with the result and the wreath is now on our front door.

Things to consider:

• The size (diameter) of the wreath
• Coverage – do you want a full or a half wreath
• Type of base – you may need more flowers for a thicker straw wreath base than just a metal circle
• Quantity of dried flowers – the above will determine how many dried flowers you’ll need for a good volume

I hope you got inspired and will give it a go. Have fun!

With love,

The blog is 6 years old this July so I though to bake a cake to celebrate this milestone and say thank you for following and reading England’s Puzzle.

I wasn’t sure if I would have time to make it over the weekend but in the end I made it.

Although the cake is very simple and quite frankly there’s nothing special about it (apart from the fact that it’s a favourite summer cake in England), I hope it may inspire you to make it. You can use any fruit but I think this cake tastes best with fresh summer berries like strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries. At the end of the day it’s a summer berry cake, isn’t it?

Batter

125g flour
125g caster sugar
50g butter
4 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
Pinch of salt

Filling

400ml double cream
Icing sugar
Vanilla extract
Berries

Method

Mix the flour, baking powder and pinch of salt in a bowl. In another bowl beat the eggs and the sugar until the mixture is fluffy.

Add the flour gradually to the egg mixture and mix it well.

Drizzle the cooled melted butter and carefully fold it into the mixture.

Grease two 20cm round cake tins with butter and line the bases with baking paper

Pour the mixture into the tins and bake it for 20-30 minutes at 180C Fan.

Remove from the oven and set the sponges aside to cool on a wire rack.

Whip the cream in a bowl and add a few drops of vanilla extract and some icing sugar according to your taste.

Spread half of the cream on your first layer and scatter over some berries.

Place the second layer onto the top, spread the rest of the cream and decorate it with the rest of the berries. Done. Your summer berry cake is ready! It wasn’t difficult, was it?

It’s a light and refreshing summer cake I’d recommend for summer parties and celebrations. It can be stored in the fridge for a few days without the cake going soggy.

What I like about it is that it’s not too sweet and the sweetness comes from the fruits rather than the filling or the sponge. That’s why it’s quite refreshing. And who doesn’t like fresh fruit on a hot summer day…?

With love,

Eton Mess is a classic, English summer dessert that consists of meringue, cream and strawberries. English summer is impossible to imagine without it – and without the “Wimbledon Cake”.

The history of the Eton Mess

Allegedly Eton Mess was first mentioned in the newspapers in 1893 when the dessert was served at Eton College after the cricket match against Harrow.

However, there’s a much cuter version of the story from 1920. The story goes that a pavlova was packed in a picnic basket which was to be served for the Eton boys after the cricket match. Allegedly, a labrador sat on the basket and smashed the pavlova. The boys didn’t mind and ate the dessert anyway.

Well, I leave it to you which story you believe.

How to make Eton Mess?

It’s very simple to make, especially if you use ready made meringues.

INGREDIENTS

6 meringue nests
500g strawberries
50g caster sugar
juice of half a lemon
450ml double cream
1 tbs icing sugar

Cut the strawberries in half and put them into a bowl. Sprinkle the caster sugar and squeeze the lemon over them.
Whip the cream until just short of stiff.

Break up the meringues with your hands into different pieces and place a layer into a bowl or a glass. Put a layer of cream on it and then a layer of strawberries. Depending on the size of the bowl or glass repeat the process.

Dust with icing sugar and serve.

Enjoy!

As winter arrives it feels good to have a bowl of hot soup. Approaching Christmas, I remembered a scene! Do you remember when Poirot ordered a soup on the train in the episode Poirot’s Christmas? If not, here is a refresher:

(Poirot is travelling to the English countryside and is sitting on a train in the dining carriage. He is having a sip of his Port.)

“Are you ready to order, Sir?”
“Ah yes, thank you very much. But please, do tell me What is this Brown Windsor Soup?”
“Well, Sir it is soup from Windsor.”
“I see.”

(The waiter is serving the soup)

“Well it does not look very délicieux…”
“Well, Sir, it IS Brown Windsor soup.”

(The scene is not in Agatha Christie’s 1930 book.)

Well, I was intrigued what this Brown Windsor Soup might be – even more so now living very close to Windsor. I was hoping to get more explanation than Poirot, so let’s see what Brown Windsor Soup is!

Not a lot to know about it…

There are a few English dishes we know little about: the lemon drizzle cake for instance and the Brown Windsor Soup. The latter is said to be a popular dish in the Victorian and Edwardian era, but in fact it only appeared on restaurant’s menus in the 1920s and 1930s.

Some recalled having eaten it on trains, but the Great Western Railway searched their archives going back to the 19th century and did not find any records of Brown Windsor Soup. Soup would not be served on trains either for obvious reasons. The author Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1924 that “things were not as good as they used to be — including Windsor soup”.

Is there a Brown Windsor Soup at all then?

It would be logical for the soup to have some sort of romantic history like Queen Victoria’s Italian chef, Francatelli making Brown Windsor Soup for the monarch at Windsor Castle, which became her favourite soup, but that is not the case, unfortunately. Brown Windsor Soup appears to be a mystery which many have heard of but nobody has tried or seen it.

However, there was a Windsor soup, but it was not brown. King George III’s and King George IV’s favourite soup was the so-called Vermicelli a la Windsor soup. This was a white soup though, made of white meat and noodles.

Francatelli did make a soup for Queen Victoria which was called Calf Feet Soup a la Windsor. It had a thick gelatine body made of calf’s feet, chicken, noodles, white wine and cream, however it was never on the Royal menus. Francatelli’s soup was altered with time: Madeira wine, cayenne pepper was added and the soup was darkened with caramel. Perhaps that’s the clue…?

What do cookbooks say?

Although the Harry Potter and Downton Abbey cookbooks list the Brown Windsor Soup, none of the cookbooks mention it before the Second World War.

In the 1920s restaurants offered Brown Windsor and Tomato soup on their menus, but no one knows what the Brown Windsor Soup was made of. In the 1940s a tinned Bachelor’s Windsor Soup appeared which allegedly tasted like gravy. Some believe that in the 1950s when food was still rationed, leftovers were mixed into mystery brown soups.

Food historian Annie Gray notes that the soup did exist but it was associated with shabby establishments where they tried to compensate the circumstances with a posh sounding dish to serve. Brown Windsor Soup also became a meme in the 1950s when it appears in comedies and jokes.

~

All in all Poirot may or may not have eaten Brown Windsor Soup on the train. I let you decide whether he did or he did not.

It has been ages since I wanted to make a crumble, which is a dessert that became popular during the Second World War in Britain, as it was an alternative to pies, due to shortages of ingredients that were rationed.

Crumbles, often remind me of cosy pubs, as you can be almost sure to find some sort of crumble on pubs‘ dessert menu during the winter season. For me, crumble is a typical autumn and winter dessert, served hot and topped with warm custard. I was surprised how easy it is to make and now that I know, I am definitely going to make it more often! Hope you too.

The best thing about a crumble is that you can use and vary, any fruits you like, plus you can use frozen fruits as well. You can use apples and blackberries or just apples, red berries and rhubarb or only rhubarb or plums. It is really up to you. In this recipe I used frozen red berries and tinned rhubarb.

INGREDIENTS:
(one baking tray)
50g flour
50g oats
50g butter
50g sugar
a hand full of walnuts
some sugar
1 tbsp lemon juice
frozen fruits or the fruit of your choice
fresh fruit would need to be pre-cooked, for best results

Custard:
570ml milk
55ml cream
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
4 egg yolks
2 tsp cornflour

 Method:

• Put the flour, butter, sugar into a bowl and rub the butter until it is evenly distributed and the mixture looks like crumbs. Then add the oats and the walnuts and mix it to the crumbs. You can skip the oats and the walnuts if you are not keen on them, but they just add to the flavour and give more crunchiness.

• Put the fruit into the baking tray, drizzle it with some sugar to taste and pour the lemon juice on it. Then mix the fruit.

• Spread the crumble mixture on the top of the fruit and bake it at 180C for 20-30 minutes. Basically the crumbs should be golden brown but be careful as the juice of the fruit can bubble over.

• Whilst the crumble is baking, let’s make the custard. Mix the egg yolks, sugar and cornflour in a bowl. Mix the milk, cream and the vanilla extract in a saucepan and bring it to the boil. Then gradually add the milk to the yolks while stirring it. Once you have added all the milk, transfer the mixture to the saucepan and cook it over medium heat while constantly stirring it until it reaches the desired consistency  – I like it thick. (If your first attempt is not thick enough use a little less milk next time to find your optimum consistency.)

• Once the crumble is golden brown, it is ready to be served. With warm custard it is delightful. The perfect dessert on a cold winter evening and definitely lifts the spirits.

Enjoy!

As soon as autumn arrives, I feel I must bake and preferably something with apples. This time I did not want to bake and apple pie again (however I was very tempted to), so I looked around and decided to go for a Mary Berry recipe which I adjusted slightly. Instead of whipped cream I used buttercream and I made my own lemon curd and did not use a ready made one.

Whenever I make a new recipe, I am worried! Is it going to turn out well, or in this instance is the lemon curd going to overpower the apple taste? And things like that go through my mind. Well, I am pleased to say that this cake did turn out well and when Bill tried it he said the first thing he could taste was the apple and not the lemon. That’s what I wanted, yaay!!

Alright let’s get down to the recipe itself – I hate those type of posts where you have to scroll down for ages to get to the Ingredients and the instructions.

INGREDIENTS

Sponge:
112g butter
112g flour
112g caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 eggs
2 eating apples

Buttercream:
100g butter
icing sugar to taste

Lemon curd:
Juice of 2,5 lemons
50g caster sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 tsp cornflour
50g butter

Important:

• The original recipe is the double amount of everything. I only use half of every recipe because it is enough for us.
• The original recipe requires 2 apples in total, but I used 2 for the half amount because I did not think one apple provided enough apple flavour. Therefore, you might want to consider using 4 apples to the original amount (i.e. The double of everything described in the ingredients section).
• As mentioned earlier, the original recipe uses whipped cream for the filling but I think that would be too moist and heavy, therefore I used buttercream.

Mix all the ingredients of the sponge in a bowl except the grated apple. Squeeze the juice out of the grated apple and then fold the grated apples into the mixture.

Transfer the mixture into a baking tin greased and lined with non-stick baking paper.

Bake it at 180C for 30-40 minutes or until done.

Once ready put it aside and let it completely cool.

For the lemon curd, mix the lemon juice, the egg, the egg yolk, the sugar and the cornflour in a bowl. Melt the butter in a saucepan on a low heat. Once the butter is completely melted, add the lemon mixture, increase the temperature to middle heat whilst stirring it continuously.

Once you get the pudding like consistency, press it through a sieve to get rid of any lumps. Set it aside to cool.

For the buttercream, beat the butter for two minutes with a hand mixer, then gradually add the icing sugar. I think it is always up to a personal taste how much icing sugar to use. I try to use as little as possible but also making sure I get the right consistency.

Once the cake is completely cooled down, cut it into half and spread the buttercream on the top of the bottom one. Then thinly spread the lemon curd and sandwich the two half sponge. Sprinkle some icing sugar on the top.

A divine cake for autumn afternoons and sharing with guests.

Give it a whirl.

If there is any tart that the British regard as a classic British tart, it is the custard tart. You can get it in almost every bakery and cake shop in the UK and indeed its greatness lays in its simplicity. I have no idea why I have not made it before, so it was high time I tried a recipe. You know what! It is amazingly easy to make.

But first let’s have a look at its history.

Custard tart resembles the Portuguese pasteis de nata (aka pasteis de Belem) the egg tarts of Hong Kong and Macau. There is one major difference though as far as the English and the Portuguese versions are concerned: the English custard tart is made of crust pastry and topped with nutmeg, while the Portuguese pasteis de nata is made with puff pastry and topped with cinnamon. As Hong Kong was a British colony it followed the English variant, and Macau having been under Portuguese authority, it followed the Portuguese recipe, albeit since 1989 only! A British pharmacist who had been living in Macau for a long time, went on holiday to Portugal and tried the pasteis de nata and prefered the egg tarts made with puff pastry and introduced this version in Macau. The other difference between the European and the Asian recipes was that in Asia they used lard instead of butter. It sort of makes sense as butter was not available in Asia and importing butter was not viable due to the long transportation.

After all this, you could ask the question, which one came first: the English or the Portuguese tart? Or, is the custard tart English at all?

In the 18th century, the monks in Portugal used egg whites to starch the clothes which resulted in a huge leftover of egg yolks. Nothing goes to waste, so they started to make egg tarts, which they either ate themselves or, sold them. The centre of making egg tarts was at Jeronimos monastery in Belem, close to Lisbon.

In England, custard tart was served at the coronation of King Henry IV in 1399, albeit they were called ‘doucettes’ at the time which came from the French word ‘doux’, meaning sweet. This does not mean that the tart itself had French origin – NB many words in English came from French.

All in all, it looks like the custard tart has indeed English origins.

Let’s see how to make custard tarts – you will be surprised how easy it is.

INGREDIENTS:

(for 10 tarts of 6cm diameter)

The Case
90g plain flour
12g ground almond
60g butter
27g caster sugar
1 egg

Custard
350ml milk
3 egg yolks
45g caster sugar
nutmeg

Mix the flour and the ground almonds in a bowl and add the butter. Rub it with your fingertips until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Add the egg and mix it with the mixture until you get a dough. Then wrap it in cling film and put it into the fridge to chill for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180C fan.

Roll out the pastry, then cut discs with a 11 or 12 cm fluted cutter. I would recommend to smear the muffin tin with butter so that it does not stick. (I used non stick parchment paper stripes but it still stuck to the tin.)

Warm the milk slowly in a saucepan until it is warm. Mix the egg yolks and the sugar then add the warm milk step by step and stir well. Sieve the custard by using a fine sieve to remove any bits.

As per the original recipe the custard should be transferred into the tarts and then baked. My experience is that this way the dough might not bake well, therefore I would pre-bake the tart for a few minutes and then would fill them with the custard. Sprinkle some ground nutmeg on the top of the tarts before baking.

Either way, it has to be baked for 25-30 minutes or until they are done.

~

Custard tarts are best when they are either luke-warm or cold. They must be consumed within one or two days but I am sure that will not be an issue as they are really good.

Enjoy!