E is for... Eggless Custard Tarts

I've been seeing wonderful egg dishes everywhere lately. (It being spring and Easter season.) Mentions of tasty cheesecakes, quiches, eggs benedict, scrambled eggs, bibimbap, Japanese ramen, egg custard pie, and... the list goes on.  The taste memory part of my brain has been in hyperdrive, drooling over half-remembered, half-imagined dishes. So good. So lovely. So delicious. So off limits to this no longer able to eat eggs girl.

Looks like it is time to try my hand at making an eggless substitution dish to meet the egg craving before the wistful wishing gets too out of hand!  Perhaps an egg(less) custard pie.

Sooooooooo.

This turned out to be a bit more of a learning curve than I had anticipated.... Mostly because I am not what you would call an expert pie baker to begin with, nor did I exactly follow a recipe.

Step 1: Make pie crust

For this I used an oil based pie crust recipe, then cut out little crusts from the dough with a biscuit cutter. Next I fitted them nicely into my silicone muffin pans. The double pie crust stretched to make 23 little crusts.  Then into the oven to bake.

*** I've done this before with buckwheat pastry, but apparently buckwheat doesn't shrink as much as a wheat crust does. The crusts turned out a little smaller than intended.

Step 2: Make the sugar cream/custard filling

Recipes  I pulled from in making the filling for my eggless tarts:

Tot's Egg Custard Pie
Erin's Sugar Cream Pie

This went along quite well until I went to pour it over into the pie crusts.

At the half point. 1 more set of 11 crusts to fill.

***See the above mention of the incredible shrinking crusts and add in the fact that that I am already making mini pies instead of one big pie and, well, there was a lot more filling than there were pie crusts to be filled. Time to pull out a baking dish and make a crustless pudding too!  

Step 3:  Bake the mini pies.

This was a "bake until it smells done/looks done" kind of step as Tot's pie called for baking at 350 for 45 minutes and Erin's pie called for baking at 375 for an hour and a half or "until the filling is lightly set but jiggles when tapped on the side" when making a whole pie.  I stuck them in the oven and promptly got distracted.  Maybe it was 30 minutes?  I baked them unitl I smelled a nice burst of warm vanilla pudding, and then went about 5 minutes more.  They had a frothy, jiggly sort of look when taking them out, and then shrunk down to a smooth, solid pudding look after cooling for half an hour. 

just out of the oven

after a few minutes

cut in half after cooling.

With the mini crusts and not being able to fill them very full, the filling to crust ratio was a little weak, but the filling dd stay in the the crust when cut.



Ready to eat!