Making Queen of Hearts Jam Tarts: A Valentines Special
It’s finally here! It’s the first recipe review of the website and what better occasion to do this than for Valentine’s Day and this recipe is perfect for sharing with those you love. I chose from my many nerdy cooking books and decided to do the Queen of Hearts Jam Tarts from the book The Geeky Chef Strikes Back by Cassandra Reeder. The tarts are inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland where Alice meets the Queen of Hearts, and someone steals her tarts. This recipe is simple to do and can be made even easier if you use shop bought pastry. For this recipe, I made the recipe from scratch and made some minor changes.
The Recipe
This recipe is made in 2 parts, making the pastry and making the tart itself. In the book, it told me to use single-crust pie dough, but I decided to double up the amount to make a total of 20 tarts. To make the pastry you will need the following ingredients:
310g white flour
½ tbsp of lemon zest
½ tbsp of orange zest (I used 2 tbsp of orange juice, as I forgot to buy an orange)
¾ tsp of salt
2 tsp of sugar
240g of butter
6 tbsp water (I suggest lowering this amount, I used 4 tbsp of water with 2 tbsp of the orange juice and I ended up needing to add extra flour, as the dough was too wet).
You mix the flour, both zests, salt and sugar in a food processor till thoroughly mixed (I just used a wooden spoon). Next to add the butter and mix in the processor till it resembles breadcrumbs (I used my hands as this is how I was taught by my mam and grandma). Once it resembles breadcrumbs, add the water and mix in till the dough is moist but not too sticky. Grab the dough, make a ball with it and wrap the dough in cling film, then put it in the fridge for a minimum of 2 hours.
To make the tarts you will need:
The dough you made earlier
340g of strawberry jam (or you could use any flavour)
Roll the dough out till it is 3mm thick and cut out disks of dough, using a circle cookie cutter and gently place into a tart tin. Continue to do this, till you run out of space to cut shapes in your dough, combine and re-roll any excess dough till your tart tin is full, making sure to leave enough excess dough to make/cut out heart shapes for the top of the tarts using a heart cookie cutter (or you can cut one bottom, then one top, so you know you have enough).
Bake the tarts in the oven for 10 minutes, remove and place a few spoonsful of jam into each tart (I placed only a teaspoon in mine and found it to be more than enough), before placing the heart tops on top (I then brushed the tops with some milk to help make it more golden). Put them back in the oven and bake for another 5 minutes (I ended up needing to bake mine for 10 minutes).
This isn’t in the recipe, but you should let the tarts cool for a minute and transfer them to a wire rack to cool down properly.
My Thoughts on the Recipe
The recipe was easy enough to follow and would have been even easier if I had used shop bought pastry. I made some minor changes and suggestions above which you may or may not find helpful, but my tarts came out very well and tasted very nice.
As stated at the beginning of the recipe, I doubled up the dough as I intended to make double the number of tarts. The original recipe said this made 12 small tarts or 6 big ones, but when I made double the amount, I only came out with 20. This could be due to the size of the cookie cutters I used for the dough, but the tarts I made were small, so it’s a shame I didn’t quite manage to double the amount.
If you were reading carefully as well through my instructions, you may have noticed a big thing missing from this recipe which I left out on purpose, which is the temperature you cook the tarts at. In the recipe, it does not clarify what temperature to put the oven, thus I had to look up the recipe in a Bero recipe book, which said to cook pastries at 200 o C (180 o C fan), which you shouldn’t be expected to do when you are following a recipe. It also does not say to preheat the oven, which I also suggest doing so your tarts cook more evenly.
I found the instructions to be basic and not as informative as they could be. I slightly tweaked the instructions for the review to help make it easier for people who don’t often cook, for example I added more baking equipment, which would make cutting the shapes of the dough easier, rather than trying to free cut it. I also included different methods for creating the dough, as saying to put the ingredients in a food processor isn’t helpful for people who don’t own one, like myself, so including alternatives to using kitchen appliances would have again been helpful.
Overall, it is a very tasty but basic recipe, which people at work gave me praise for however, if you follow the recipe as it, I don’t believe they would have turned out as good as mine did. The lack of proper instructions and equipment really lets the recipe down and if you aren’t an experienced cook/baker, you might undercook your tarts easily. I suggest making this recipe, but also to take my little notes into consideration when baking them.
