I love these beautiful little beasts, crisp and custardy, blackened sugar and distant hint of summer.
I tried two recipes today, one which took hours and bowls and careful balancing, and produced the mildly curdled Georgia O’Keeffe numbers on the left, and another which was deliciously simple and made my neighbour’s mother (a cooperative tester) say, ‘Oh, those ones were just… oooh!’
Here we go, my adapted version of the second recipe:
Makes 12
- 1 320g ready-rolled puff pastry sheet
- 1 large egg
- 2 large egg yolks
- 100g caster sugar
- 2 tbsp cornflour
- 400ml full fat milk
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- Zest of half a lemon, v v v finely grated
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- Butter for greasing
Generously butter a 12-hole muffin tray, a good deep one, not one of those shallow indecisive numbers. Put it in the fridge to keep your puff pastry company.
Put egg, yolks, sugar and cornflour in a saucepan and whhhhhhisk with a balloon whisk until smooth as silk, then gradually whhhhhhhisk in the milk. Turn on a medium heat — just below medium-high, as if you’re threatening the pan that things can get so much hotter — and whhhhhhisk until it thickens up. DO NOT LEAVE THE PAN. DO NOT CEASE YOUR WHISKING. It doesn’t take that long; perhaps a few minutes? But not worth wrecking your day by wandering off. Once it’s thick and custardy, turn off the heat, mix in the vanilla, lemon zest and cinnamon, then put in a heavy bowl and cover it with clingfilm to prevent a skin forming while it cools.
Turn the oven onto 200ºC/180ºC fan.
This is the bit I had to look at loads of recipes to understand, because it seemed so odd:
Remove the puff pastry sheet from the fridge. Unroll it, peel off the paper, then re-roll into its original sausage form. Then slice that sausage into 1-1.5cm portions, so you’ll hopefully have 12 squashed-looking blobs that would be circles if the pastry was, say, chorizo. Does that make sense?
Then! Take your cooled muffin tray, and squash each blob into each hole with your thumbs, pushing it up the sides so it’s a uniform-ish depth throughout the hole, and the pastry reaches up most if not the whole of the sides, cup-like. (Reading the instructions, I somehow imagined the pastry would unravel and I’d be dealing with something like an apple-peel-peeled-in-one, but it’s actually all just dough.)
Into that dough casing, spoon your custard mix. Not riiiiiight to the top, but leave perhaps 4mm. Most recipes say leave a full cm, but I like it toppling over slightly and burning against the hot metal, for that burnt sugar bite.
Cook for 25-30mins, keeping an eye to check the custard top is really darkening in sections and the pastry is golden. Remove once cooked, leave to cool for 5 minutes in the tin, then knife-out and either eat immediately, or leave to cool further on a wire rack (the longer you leave them, the more integrity they’ll have).
(I’ve had the new Loyle Carner album on all day, soundtracking everything from a run this morning to dozing in the garden with my roomie, and repotting successful seedlings to a family-wide repetition of new favourite phrase. It’s such great music.)
Bon appétit, mes anges.