Jam Tarts

If you’ve got friends or family coming over, and you don’t have the time to spend ages in the kitchen making cakes, why not just make some jam tarts? Everyone likes jam tarts, don’t they? If you skip the homemade pastry part and have ready-made shortcrust pastry, you can have these done and ready to eat in less than 20 minutes. I also added a bit of streusel topping to these ones as I had some left over from this recipe.

Ingredients:

1 egg

125g golden caster sugar

1 tsp vanilla essence

250g plain flour

125g butter, cubed

Any flavour jam and/or lemon curd

To make the pastry, put the egg and sugar into a bowl and whisk until the sugar has dissolved into the egg.

Then sift the flour into the bowl and mix well, making sure there are no pockets of flour, until it is sandy in texture.

Lastly, add the butter and cut in with a pastry cutter or butter knife, until it forms a sticky ball.

Turn the dough out onto a light floured surface and knead together for a few minutes to get rid of any lumps of butter, then wrap in clingfilm or greaseproof paper and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Pre-heat your oven to 180c and lightly grease a couple of cupcake trays.

To make the tarts, roll out the pastry onto a lightly floured surface to the thickness of a £1 coin. Use a round cookie cutter that is slightly bigger than the cupcake holes to cut out the tart cases, re-rolling the off cuts, until all the dough is used up.

Line each cupcake hole with a pastry case, and add a heaped teaspoon of jam/lemon curd to the centre of each case.

Bake for 15 minutes, until the jam is bubbling slightly and the pastry is lightly browned.