Pineapple Tarts

Being a career woman who only has three free hours per weeknight to play with, I can only afford to try out one kind of Chinese New Year goodie each year. Last year, I tried making kueh bangkit. This year, I decided to make pineapple tarts because it's both my mum and mother-in-law's favourite CNY goodie.

Chinese are very supersticious people, we like to have all kinds of 'lucky' things surrounding us during CNY so that we will have good luck for the rest of the year. One of my colleagues who doesn't cook will always keep a fish and some prawns in her freezer during CNY. That's because fish represents 年年有余 (a year of abundance) and prawns represents 笑哈哈 (full of laughter). After the new year, she will take the fish and prawns to her mum's place so that her mum can cook them for dinner. Imagine a person who doesn't cook doing this, so how can cooks not do something to increase their luck?!

My pineapple tarts will do the trick. Pineapple (黄梨) is pronounced as ong lye in dialect. Ong sounds like 旺 (good luck) while lye sounds like 来 (come). Add them up, it means good luck come come v(^___^)v

Experimented with Ju's melt-in-the-mouth pastry recipe with some variation in the butter and amount of corn flour. I came up with something that might suit my mum's fussy tastebuds.

Pineapple tarts

(adapted from The Little Teochew)

Ingredients:

380g plain flour
70g corn flour

6 tbsp icing sugar

280g cold, salted butter cut into cubes
3 egg yolks, beaten

3 tbsp ice-cold water

Method:

• Sieve the dry ingredients into a large bowl.
• Add cold butter cubes into flour mixture and cut butter into tiny pieces, coating them with flour after each cut till it represents fine breadcrumbs.
• Mix egg yolks with ice-cold water and add to 'breadcrumb' mixture.
• Form the mixture into a dough. Do not knead or overhandle the dough.
• Rest and chill dough for at least 20 minutes.
• Roll dough out into 7mm thickness and cut dough with pineapple tart moulds.
• Lay on baking tray and chill for 10 minutes.
• Put pineapple jam onto the cookie.
• Bake at 175`C for 20 minutes, turning the tray after 12 minutes of baking.

Time for my favourite K-drama Daja's Spring now... Ciao! ^^