Butter Tartlets, another birthday dish

I seem to have come into quite a bit of free time of late; you may have noticed my sporadic commenting and I do apologize but we’ve been spending a lot of time at the cottage (cabin/lake house). We renovated or more accurately, gave it a face lift and that makes me want to spend more time there. Freshly painted white walls instead of the dowdy wood panelling from the 1960’s, replaced the linoleum and industrial carpeting with lovely wood laminate flooring added some kitchen cabinets in my efforts to annoy the mice and even gave the furniture a face lift too with new slip covers — and purchased new artwork! You can see my excitement. So we’ve been making the most of it. Come September I hope to be back in the normal swing of things.
In the meantime I wanted to share a recipe for Butter Tartlets that I made for my birthday bash from my very ancient Five Roses Flour cookbook and I’ve been making these tartlets since I began to bake in my early teens — they have been a family favourite. This time I used a flower cookie cutter to give them a lovely scalloped edge and I baked them in mini muffin tins so they are quite small, one or two bites.

Caramelized brown sugar coating the flaky pastry.

Prize Butter Tartlets

Original recipe from Five Roses Flour Cookbook (1983)

Makes about 18 mini two bite tartlets

Ingredients for the pastry:

• 1 1/2 cup of AP flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup vegetable shortening
• 5-6 tbsp ice cold water

Directions for the pastry:

We all have our favourite pastry recipes so if you prefer to use your own, by all means do so but I hope you make these tasty tarts!

1. Mix flour and salt together and cut in the shortening with a pastry blender or fork until the mixture is crumbly (like oatmeal).
2. Add water a little at a time until the mixture hold together, do not overwork.
3. Roll out to about an 1/8th of an inch or 1 mm thick and cut with an appropriate cookie cutter (I used a lovely scalloped edge to make my tartlets).
4. Press into a mini muffin tin and refrigerate until you have prepared the filling.

They are rather small, are you sure I can’t interest you in more than one?

Ingredients for the filling:

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup or 36 small pieces of walnuts
• 1/4 cup melted butter (unsalted)
• 1 small egg, beaten
• 1 tbsp milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 tsp dark rum (secret ingredient)

Directions for the filling:

1. Melt brown sugar and butter together (I do this in a microwave, on low) allow to cool a bit.
2. Add the beaten egg, milk and flavourings. Mix well.
3. Spoon about 2 teaspoonful into each pastry tartlet and add 2 walnut pieces to each. Bake in a 375°F oven for about 15-20 minutes or until the pastry has browned a bit.

You know you want one!

These two are before photos, dark and dowdy:

We changed the colour scheme to blues and whites to reflect the boathouse theme a bit more. The refrigerator was a later gift from my Mom’s husband so it’s a bit of an after thought, we’ll incorporate it into the kitchen when we get rid of the propane burners, which protrude out from the wall.
Sigh, back to reality!

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