I've been making PCTs for a while now, courtesy of Bill Granger's quite achievable recipe.
Speaking as someone who has never had an affinity with custard, either cooking or eating it (dating back to a traumatic experience in primary school involving bananas, packet custard and a boy named Karl) I'm quite proud of my custard tarts.
I'm also becoming more fussy about the quality of the tarts I eat that are made by others.
So when I had an event recently at Parliament House, I took the opportunity to have PCTs on the menu for morning tea, knowing that the pastry chef at Parliament House is a pretty talented individual.
Firstly, a custard tart at 10.30am when you have been up since 4.30am, already run one event and are a good way into the second tastes pretty good.
The custard was good - a bit softer than mine with a nice flavour. A lovely dusting of powdered sugar and a little bit caramalised around the edges. The pastry wasn't very crisp. My kind banquets person on the day gave me a take home pack for the children and they loyally said they preferred mine. Time to compare.
A weekend batch of custard tarts resulted. I made the custard a bit looser than I usually do and infused a bit of mandarin peel in the custard. They came out of the oven looking pretty good and we took them around to share with Bronwen and Claire M.
Bronwen, not having tasted the Parliament House version was unable to compare. The girls and Claire M could compare. We seem to prefer my pastry and the Parliament House custard.
I'm going to keep working on this, since a good PCT is a fabulous thing. And with new chickens on the scene at Bronwen's place (welcome to Twitter and FaceChook) eggs are not something we are short of. I'll keep you posted on how I go.
oooh they look SO good.
ReplyDeleteThey are good Kerrie, and not that hard to make. With your new chickens you should have enough eggs to give them a go yourself!
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