Pineapple Tarts

Wow.... Chinese New Year is around the corner... Now you can find alot of those New Year Cookies all around Singapore. Pineapple tarts is one of the most famous cookies of all. Since I had a packet of pineapple paste which is in the fridge, I decided to do a trial on this before making the actual stuffs for New Year next two weeks. This recipe is from one of the mum's in the M4M site but I modify it a bit with the ingredients. The texture of this cookies is those Melt In Your Mouth type..... so you will find it very hard to resists yourself on keep eating them.....




Ingredients Pastry Dough:
300g Plain Flour
40g Milk Powder
1.5 Tablespoon Icing Sugar
250g Cold Butter, cubed
1 Egg Yolk, lightly beaten
½ Teaspoon Vanilla Essence
1 Beaten Egg, for glazing

Methods:
1. Put sifted flour, milk powder and icing sugar in a mixing bowl.
2. Rub in butter until mixture resembles breadcrumbs. (must be fast or else the butter will melt and the dough will became very soft)
3. Beat in the egg yolk and essence.
4. Mix well to form a dough. Place in a plastic bag and chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
5. Roll pastry out to 0.5 cm thickness on a lightly-floured tabletop and cut out rounds with a tart cutter.
6. Glaze the tart based with beaten egg then fill each piece of cut-out pastry with pineapple jam filling.
7. Cut thin strips of pastry to form a lattice on top of each tart.
8. Preheated oven at 180°C and bake the tarts for 15 minutes.
9. Reduce the temperature to 170°C and continue to bake for another 5 minutes or until golden.
10. Turn tarts out to cool on a wire rack before storing in air-tight containers.

Notes: This is a very soft dough, so you can divide the dough into a few portion and keep the rest in the fridge while working with 1 portion.
Or you can flour the dough with some extra flour and work fast with the cutter, cut out all the tarts base frist then brush with beaten egg and top with pineapple fillings.
You can get those ready made pineapple filling from most baking stores, you can roll them into small cherry size balls and place it in plastic container first before making the dough.