Sales and tarts

Sale
Ladies, get 30% off every item (including sale items!) at Esprit. The coupon code is friends68. Feel free to pass it on.

Tarts
Since I recently picked up some mini-muffin tins, I made mini nut tarts for my cohort today. I found a recipe in my teatime cookbook for Nut Tassies, small tarts made of a cream cheese dough and filled with a brown-sugar-egg-and-nut mixture. The tarts were amazingly easy and quick to make. I’ve never made such a pliable, elastic dough. It felt like rubber when I was working with it, but it came out light and subtly flavored, like soft cookies.

The tarts are freaking delicious, and they taste even better the second day.

Nut Tassies
recipe makes 36 or more (the recipe in the book said 36, but I had 42 and could have stretched it much farther)

Crust:
1c butter, softened (2 sticks)
8 ounces cream cheese (1 package)
2c flour

Equipment:
ungreased mini-muffin pans

Mix softened butter and cream cheese until blended. Mix in flour.

Pinch off small balls of dough and press into mini-muffin cups, covering the bottom and sides. This is a very forgiving, elastic dough. You can be a little imprecise with it.

Filling:
2 eggs
1½c firmly packed brown sugar
2 tbsps butter, softened
1/8 tsp salt
1½ tsps vanilla extract
1c finely chopped walnuts, pecans, or other nuts

Preheat oven to 350°F. Combine eggs, sugar and butter. Add salt and vanilla.

Assembly:
Sprinkle nuts into the bottom of each tart, reserving ½c for topping.

Fill each tart with the filling mixture. Sprinkle remaining ½c nuts on top.

Bake 25 minutes or until crusts are lightly browned.
It can be helpful to place the muffin tins on baking sheets while baking, to make removing tins from oven easier.

If you have extra filling left over, grease the muffin cups and bake the filling along with the tarts. Don’t eat the baked filling until the next day, after it has softened a little.

You can probably try making these with regular muffin tins too, or mini tart pans, but make sure the tarts are very shallow, as the center probably won’t get baked enough otherwise.

[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]