Pineapple Tarts

If there's only a Must-Do bake for Chinese New Year, it has to be pineapple tarts. I love my tarts to be melt-in-your mouth kind of texture and I have found a good and easy recipe last year. This will probably be the same old recipe for me to bake for the rest of my CNY.

This recipe yields about 70 tarts, you will get more if your tarts are not as big as mine. Yes, mine are pretty big just the filling alone is 2cm wide :P

Ingredient
300g unsalted butter
60g castor sugar
1.5 egg yolks
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
450g plain flour
38g custard powder (not instant custard powder)
3/4 tsp salt
1 kg of ready-made pineapple paste (I used AAA brand, not so sweet)

0.5 egg yolk + 1 tbsp milk for glazing

(Recipe modified from Goh Ngaileng)

Method
1. Start with the filling first as this is time consuming, I took almost an hour to roll the whole pack of pineapple paste into 74 balls. The size is about 2cm, this is consider big. You can roll it into 1.5cm. I did it a day before and store the balls in the fridge.
2. Cream butter and sugar.
3. Mix in beaten egg yolk and vanilla essence.
4. Sift in plain flour, custard powder and salt. Fold and mix well to form dough.
5. Cover with cling wrap and chill it inside the fridge for 10-20 mins.
6. Take a small part of the dough and roll it into a ball slightly bigger than your pineapple filling. Flatten it and wrap the filling. Seal and roll into round or other desirable shape. How thick the crust will be is determined by how much dough you are using.
7. Glaze with egg yolk and milk.
8. Bake in preheat oven at 170-180 degree Celsius for 15mins or until the top form light golden brown.

Starlet retro pineapple balls, after glazing and before bake.

Rose pineapple tarts, before glazing and bake. 

Dual colored rose pineapple tarts after bake.

Besides the balls with a star imprint, I also did the rose design. For this design, you will need to get a crimper. A crimper is a small stainless steel pastry tool, it's a tweezers with serrated tips. It is available at baking stores like Phoon Huat. After rolling and sealing the filling with dough, crimp the top 3 times to form a triangle design. And crimp the 2nd layer below 5 times to from a hexagon design. I didn't do a good job in the design, I have seen others crimping really pretty rose pattern on their pineapple tarts. One thing I discovered is you need a thicker dough to crimp a more obvious petal design. For my thin dough, that's the most I could crimped. But I am not disheartened, looking at the rose tarts in dual colors actually make me happy. Don't they look like ice-cream or cupcakes when I arranged them in the bottles? These sweet little ones are brightening up my days.

Did a second batch of pineapple tarts few days before CNY as the first batch was almost gone :( So fast! This time I bought Bake King brand pineapple paste to try, verdict is not so sweet. I would say is comparable to AAA brand but AAA is much cheaper. I also made smaller tarts this time, the filling is 8g and dough at about 10g. Here's the result: