Cake 6 - Chinese Style Custard Tarts

Baking a cake Malaysian style is entering into the unknown for me. With ingredients ranging from pandan leaves to glutinous rice flour, and cooking methods including steaming, it was never going to be a straight forward task. Shopping for ingredients is an experience in itself. Everything you struggle to find in the UK for your oriental recipes is here in abundance, whereas finding something like vanilla extract becomes like the quest for the Holy Grail! Anyway, after a week of looking for recipes and asking advice from Malaysian friends, I decided to start off with an East meets West fusion – something to ease me in gently before I start messing around with banana leaves or agar agar.

I chose to bake Chinese Style Custard Tarts. “Chinese?” I hear you say, “That’s not a Malaysian recipe!” Well, as it happens, Malaysia is a melting pot of people from different cultures and backgrounds, and the Chinese influence here is huge. In most bakeries in Malaysia you will find these little custard tarts, and they are enjoyed by all. So, history lesson over – now onto the baking itself.

The first thing to do was to make the pastry which unlike English style custard tart pastry, contained sugar and an exceedingly large quantity of butter. English pastry is usually half fat to flour, but this was probably three quarters fat. I feel like I'm committing a sin just writing this, that much butter is so decadent and wrong...but let's not dwell on that too much.

Once I had mixed the butter and sugar in a bowl, I had to add an egg along with the flour, and stir it all together. I felt like I had broken every rule of making pastry in one go. Anyone who has made pastry knows that you don't just stir it all together, and you certainly don't make it in a kitchen at 35 degrees. Just leaving the butter out on the work surface for 2 minutes resulted in an oil slick. To avoid disaster I wrapped the finished ball of stirred together pastry in tinfoil, and put in the fridge to keep cool. It was then time to turn my attention to the filling.

The first thing you notice about a Chinese custard tart is that it is considerably more yellow than an English one. I thought this was probably due to the addition of yellow food colouring, seeing as most of the desserts here are brightly coloured. As it turns out, I was wrong - it’s because Chinese custards use a lot more egg. Nine in fact. It's official, I have never used as many eggs in a recipe!

The method for making the custard was as different as that of the crust. I boiled water and sugar in a pan on the stove, and then allowed to cool back to room temperature - which was probably almost as hot as the pan. I then added the nine whisked eggs, and poured these into the water along with a dash of milk. The recipe did recommend that you strain the mixture, but after a feeble attempt at pouring the liquid through a sieve the size of a tea strain I decided I didn't have the tools for the job.

Having avoided the inevitable for some time now, I decided to take a deep breath and turn--on--the--oven. Gasp.

I brought the pastry back out of the fridge and quickly set about pressing balls of the mixture into the cake moulds. The trick is to roll a ball of pastry, and press into the mould with your fingers, starting in the middle so that the pastry is automatically pushed up at the sides. I had never used this method before, but it worked wonders! When this was done, I poured the bright yellow custard mixture into the pastry cases, put into the oven to bake, and retreated to a safe distance away from the heat.

When baked, they looked like little sunshines, all sparkly and yellow in the middle, with lightly browned crisp and buttery pastry cases. Taste wise, the sweet egg custard filling lived up to its name, with the egg being a lot more prominent than in a custard of western origin. The pastry crust was just melt in your mouth gorgeous, and reminded me a lot of shortbread. Once again, I used the security guards as my taste panel – which I must point out is not because my parents are under house arrest, they guard the condo in which they live! All agreed that the Chinese Style Custard Tarts were a worthy tribute to the Malaysian favourite.