pineapple tarts.

guest-starring weiliang liew, who roped me in on his effort to build a multi-million-dollar pineapple-tart enterprise. soon to take london by storm, look out for it.


so the entire idea of pineapple tarts is simple. barely sweet pineapple jam baked in, or on, a crumbly buttery crust. they appear as covered up cookies, or thumbprint ones and can be as elaborate as you would suppose. only 2 parts to the cookies ultimately, pineapples and butter and as with most things this simple, it's very difficult to get it right, as you'll soon find out.


our pièce de résistance, homemade pineapple jam. a family recipes, so unuploadable. if you go search online though, you'll probably find a couple variations on sugar and pineapple quantities. just experiment! he made about three pineapples worth, and that's a huge (and very tiring!) batch of cookies. i would think start small.



our first try at the cookie dough. this turned out very crumbly, and difficult to work with because the dough didn't clump together. wl, oh master baker, mentioned that the unbaked dough could reflect the texture of the product after baking, but im not too sure. this worked out into a very nicely crumbly AND INCREDIBLY tasty dough, but with the quantity of pineapple paste we had to deal with, it just wasnt practical.

being of greater perseverance than i could ever aspire to be, he managed to gather it into a soft dough to wrap around pineapple jam. see how soft the dough is! it flops over the paste. dear lord i gave up on this while he went on.


oh great warrior, be strong.


subsequent scoring, and even that was difficult. this first experiment was very tumultous, but it really should teach me some patience. or teach me that i have none.
i think the latter, that's easier.

but i moved on! i made a different dough in order to test out recipes as well. this one turned out so pretty and easily worked into a dough.

time to highlight something else! there are two schools of thought on rolling these pastries out. WEILIANG LIEW'S involves rolling out the dough into a rectangle and laying out a strip of pineapple jam in the middle before rolling them all together, cutting and then smoothing the dough over the ends to seal.

mine involves (and this is embarrassing): make balls from the dough, roll that out into a rectangle, place jam in the middle, roll that up into a cylinder and then cut that into smaller pieces, before rolling the dough into a ball again with the jam in the middle, then gently mould it into a cylinder, before reaching the same results as you would get with weiliang liew's. here is a pictorial:

male vs female methods, if one could be so shameless as to stereotype all women with my impracticality. choose the one that best suits you, but if you pick my method, make sure you're baking ALONE or with someone that indulges your eccentricities.


but look, they turned out so pretty!


but this is what is also known as a disaster. not mine. i love being able to shift the blame to someone else! (delegation of mistakes is what baking with someone else was meant to be like.) it looks positively tumor-like. young kids, if you ever see something like this be sure to tell your parents. it's a monster.

as you can see, the dough could not contain the pineapple and THEY MERGED INTO A MUTANT MIX.




our finished tarts and cookies. sho pwetty, really. they made quite a few and took us about 5 hours total perhaps to use up the jam, but they were worth it. bear in mind that i was playing with the dough while he was hard at work, so that probably added to the time.

goodness, i want one of these now.