Jam Tarts

A few weeks ago I made some lemon tarts I didn't use all of the sweet pastry used in that recipe so I froze half of it. This week I planned to bake some little treats to take to work to raise money for Derby Kids Camp a charity I volunteer for. Myself and a friend have organised a big walking challenge so all of the proceeds from my bakes will be added to those efforts.

I thought this would be a great opportunity to use up that spare pastry and make some little jam tarts. However I actually forgot to take the pastry out of the freezer so ended up making a fresh batch. I plan to use to frozen batch to make some more jam tarts to send to my mum's school to raise some extra pennies so it won't go to waste.


To make 24 large tarts and 24 mini tarts you will need:

• 2 teaspoons of vanilla bean paste
• 400g plain flour
• 35g ground almonds
• 75g icing sugar
• 250g unsalted butter
• 2 large egg yolks
• a little pinch of salt
• 1 tablespoon of  really cold water
• 2 jars of your chosen jam fillings

For detailed instructions on how to make the pastry please visit my previous post available here...essentially put all the the flour, almonds, sugar, vanilla and butter in a bowl and work to a bread crumb texture. Add the egg yolks and water and work into a dough. 

After you have made your pastry and allowed it to chill for 1 hour you need to roll it out on a lightly floured surface. I used a deep muffin tin and a mini muffin tin to make the different sizes of my tarts.

To make sure you are using the right sized cutters hold your cutters over the muffin tins and pick on that is slightly larger than the tin hole.

With your chosen cutters cut the pastry into rounds and then gently push the cut pasty into your tins.

You now need to fill them with jam. The key here is not to over fill them. For perfect tarts with a clean edge of pastry less is more. For the large tins I put 1 tablespoon of jam in each case and for the smaller tins I added 1/2 a tablespoon.

These need to bake for around 30 minutes at around 200 fan. Keep a close eye on them. You want your pastry to be golden brown. Take them out too soon and you risk the dreaded 'soggy bottom'.

Allow your tarts to cool completely before attempting to get them out of the tin using a knife. If you try and do this when they are warm they will crumble and whilst they will still be tasty they will be very messy to eat - as I experienced!

That's all there is too it! 

Happy baking - Rach x