Egg tarts

The other day, I was at the bakery with Cassie and she asked if I could buy her some egg tarts.  Unfortunately, they were out, so I promised that I would buy her some more the next time we went to a bakery.  Unfortunately again, I didn't get a chance to go to the bakery again, so I decided to just try making them.

Thanks to Mr. Google, I found several recipes.  After a bit of research, I decided to buy frozen tart shells, the egg custard recipe from this site, and the baking method of this site.  It probably would have been better to use the recipe from the second site, but I couldn't figure out if the recipe was asking for milk powder or evaporated milk liquid, so I gave up and tried a different site.  However, the reviews from the all recipes site said that the temperature was too high, so hence I merged the two recipes.


Here are the ingredients:

2/3 cup white sugar
1.5 cups water
9 eggs
1 dash vanilla
1 cup of evaporated milk

Here is the way I baked them:
1.  Boil the water and sugar until the sugar is completely dissolved.  The scientist in me kept shrieking "I'm making a supersaturated solution!!!!"  (Ignore that sentence if you have no idea what I'm talking about)
 Let the sugar water cool to room temperature

2.  Preheat oven at 390 degrees F.

3.  Open the package of frozen tart shells, as per the instructions on the box.  Not difficult at all.

4.  Beat the eggs and strain into the sugar water.  Mix well.

5.  Stir in the vanilla and evaporated milk.

6.  Strain the mixture again, and pour into the shells.  The two straining steps are VERY important.

7.  Pour into the shells and bake.  Now here is the picky part.  The baking is done in two phases.  In phase one, I baked the egg tarts at the preheated temperature for 15 minutes, until the edges of the tarts were golden brown.  Then I decreased the temperature to 360 degrees F, and watched the egg tarts carefully.  One they started to puff a bit, I opened the oven door about 2 inches.  According to the website that I read, this prevents the egg custard from super-puffing and then deflate into volcanoes while cooling.  I let the egg tarts bake until the custard was completely solid.  The test is to stick a toothpick into it, and if it doesn't fall, it's done.

8.  Let cool and enjoy!

One extra note.  There was way too much egg custard, but I haven't figured out how much to decrease the egg custard by.  I baked six small foil containers of just the egg custard, which tasted pretty good by itself as well.

Cassie got so excited when she saw the trays of egg tarts.  Ken came home and ate 5 in a row.