Pineapple tarts (work in progress 2)

This recipe gives a nice, airy tart base - much liked and sought after by some, but I would prefer something slightly harder. The trick is to rub in the butter to flour, rather than creaming the butter and eggs.

The buttery dough gets soft fast and thus hard to work with. Chilling it for at least an hour and having plenty of flour on hand for the work surface helps.

We found that rolling the store-bought pineapple jam early and letting them sit out at room temperature for an hour or so yields soft pineapple toppings even after twenty min in the oven! Another tip I read online to keeping the jam balls moist is to roll them with clean wet hands.

I also found that if you want to add a little design or flower to top the tarts, it would be better to use a drier potion of dough (or you can let it dry out a little or simply add more flour), punch out the flower pieces early and let them dry out at room temperature. This makes then easier to handle.

Below is the recipe we used, with comments for adjustments that I want to make in our next attempt.

450g flour
50g cornflour (might skip this and use 50g flour instead)
280g butter (might need to reduce to 250g)
Half tsp salt
6 tbsp icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence + 3 egg yolks + 3 tbsp water

Glaze : 1 egg yolk + 1 tbsp water

160 degrees, 20 min

Yields 99 tarts, with 500g pineapple jam.