My Mum's treacle tart

Treacle Tart

This week’s recipe is a very special treacle tart made using my Mum’s pastry recipe. It’s not quite traditional so I also tell you the changes needed to make it in the completely traditional way in the video below.

Ingredients
For the filling: 1 1/2 cups white breadcumbs

3/4 cup of treacle

Optional

zest and juice of 1/2 a lemon (I don’t like it with treacle so I leave it out)

1/2 cup of raisins or sultanas

1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger

For the pastry

500gm or 1lb 1 1/2oz self raising flour. Use plain flour for a more traditional shortcrust pastry.

250gm or 8 3/4 oz of butter or cooking margarine.

2 eggs mixed with a little water.

1/2 cup of white sugar.

Oven temperature: 190 degrees C or 375 degrees F

This recipe makes 8-10 serves

Method

Preheat your oven.

Rub sugar (or salt), flour and margarine together until it feels like bread-crumbs.

Add egg water and mix gently until combined.

Rest in the fridge for half an hour. The pastry, not you.

Roll out and cut a circle to fit an 8″ or 20 cm pie tin.

Grease and flour your pie tin and lay the pastry base in it.

Line the top of the pastry shell with baking paper and weight down with rice or pie weights and bake for 15 minutes.

Combine the bread crumbs and treacle and pour into the baked pie crust.

Cut strips of pastry and lay across the top in a lattice design. Press down around the

Bake for 30 – 35 minutes or until the pastry is golden brown.

Serve with custard or whipped cream.

Custard made without custard powder

Custard Made without Custard Powder

A traditional stove-top custard made without the use of custard powder. Plus you get a little custard trivia in the video :)

Ingredients

All tablespoons are 15ml. Australians should adjust accordingly (depending on whether you have a standard Aussie 20ml tablespoon or a regular 15ml one)

2 US pints/950ml of milk

2tsp vanilla

3tbls of corn flour (US corn starch) for pouring custard or more for thicker custard

4tbls of sugar

2 eggs

Makes 4-12 servings, depending on how hungry you are and whether you’re just nomming custard or serving it with something else.

Method

Mix the cornflour with a little bit of the milk so that it forms a smooth paste.

Put your milk and vanilla in a double boiler (if you’re brave and ave very thick bottomed saucepans you can cook straight on the stove) and heat until almost boiling.

Stir in the cornflour mixture and keep stirring until it thickens.

Once it’s thickened, add the sugar and the beaten eggs and keep stirring until it’s the right consistency.