Tartlets are an appetizer that can decorate any New Year's table. But it is often difficult to find tasty and high-quality baskets for filling. In such a situation, you can bake them yourself. There are many options for how to make dough for tartlets, from which each housewife can find what will be within her power and liking.
How to make tartlets at home?
For homemade snack baskets, it's not enough to knead a delicious dough, you still need to be able to shape them correctly. There are three ways to make dough tartlets and another quick way that doesn't involve fiddling with the dough at all. Let's consider each of them in more detail with photo and video explanations of the process.
Using iron molds
Small metal muffin tins are ideal for baking shortcrust pastry baskets. To form them, you need to act as follows:
- Roll out the shortbread dough into a layer no more than 5 mm thick.
- Cut out circles with a curly edge with a cupcake mold like a glass.
- Place each circle in a separate mold and distribute with your fingers along the sides and walls.
- Send the workpieces to the refrigerator for 20-30 minutes, pre-prick the bottom with a fork. Then bake in a preheated oven until golden brown.
Since there is enough fat in the shortcrust pastry, the molds do not need to be greased. Ready-made tartlets will perfectly lag behind the walls.
Tartlets without molds
This shaping method is suitable for shortcrust pastry and puff pastry. Instead of special culinary rings or cuttings, you can use ordinary glasses of different diameters. The sequence of forming products in this case will be as follows:
- Roll out shortbread or puff pastry into a layer 0.5-0.7 cm thick.
- Cut circles from it with a glass of larger diameter.
- In half of the circles, cut out the centers with a glass (or ring) of a smaller diameter.
- Place the resulting rings on the circles to make the sides. For greater reliability, they can be glued together with an egg shaken until smooth.
The bottom of the products also needs to be pricked with a fork, and the sides are not worth it, because the higher they rise, the more filling will fit into the tartlet.
No problems with dough: from pita bread
Quite quickly and simply, you can prepare snack baskets from thin Armenian lavash. The sequence of actions with this method of formation will be as follows:
- Cut a thin sheet of pita bread into small equal squares.
- Lay them in pairs on top of each other, as shown in the video. To keep them better, you can grease the contact points with an egg.
- Then line the bottom and walls of a metal muffin mold with them.
- Dry the pita bread in a preheated oven for 3-5 minutes. Then let the tartlets cool, remove them from the mold and fill them with the prepared filling. By the way, you can also make rolls from pita bread. They are beautiful, delicious and very easy to prepare.
In a similar way, you can form baskets from hot waffles, without folding them once after baking into a tube, but placing them in a muffin mold.
How to apply the silicone mold?
The difficulty in using a silicone mold when baking homemade tartlets is that it is very difficult to distribute the dough on the side walls in it. When pressed with hands, they are deformed every now and then.
To prevent this, the cut out round blanks are placed in molds using a special device that can easily replace a glass of the corresponding diameter. A circle of dough is placed on its bottom from the outside, and then the vessel is turned over and placed in a silicone mold.
5 dough recipes for homemade tartlets
The dough for can be puff, shortbread, yeast, custard and even pancake. Below are proven recipes for each of the possible options, as well as the subtleties of baking.
And also, we have prepared 30 of the most delicious options for tartlet fillings.
Puff pastry
It is easier to buy unleavened or yeast puff pastry in a store in the form of a ready-made frozen semi-finished product. But if the hostess wants to make snack baskets on her own, controlling the composition of not only the filling, you can use a lightweight version of false puff or chopped dough.
To prepare it you will need:
- 1 egg;
- 60 g sour cream;
- 120 g frozen butter;
- 3 g salt;
- 310 g flour.
Step by step recipe:
- Mix flour with salt. Then grate the frozen oil into it on a coarse grater and quickly grind everything into crumbs. The oil should not start to melt.
- After that, add sour cream with an egg and quickly collect the dough into a lump, which, wrapped in foil, put it in the cold for at least 40 minutes.
- Roll out the cooled dough quickly, form tartlets from it in any chosen way and bake them.
The recipe for this dough is good because it can be prepared for future use and stored in the refrigerator, and if necessary, you can take out and bake fresh homemade tartlets.
Shortcrust pastry
Literally a couple of hours of free time you need to spend to cook a whole mountain of 30 delicious homemade shortcrust pastry baskets on yolks. It includes:
- 2 yolks;
- 250 g soft butter;
- 200 g flour;
- salt and sugar are added to your taste depending on the filling used (sweet or savory).
Preparation:
- Beat the softened butter with a mixer until fluffy with sugar and salt. Then, continuing to beat, introduce the yolks into it one by one.
- After that, add sifted flour and knead a pliable dough, which is immediately distributed in metal molds and put in the refrigerator for an hour.
- Bake the cooled workpieces for 12-15 minutes in an oven preheated to 180 degrees.
After cooling, such tartlets are completely ready for further use.
Yeast dough
For those who are friends with yeast dough, the following recipe will help prepare delicious tartlets:
- 200 ml of milk;
- 100 g sugar for sweet products and half as much for savory products;
- 10 g dry yeast;
- 2 eggs;
- 3 g salt;
- 500 g flour.
Mixing sequence:
- Dissolve yeast and sugar in warm milk. Let the mixture stand warm for a quarter of an hour until a frothy cap appears on top.
- Whisk the eggs until smooth and pour into the milk. Then, adding flour in small portions, knead an elastic soft dough.
- Give the batch a little rest and come up. After that, knead the mass, shape and bake the tartlets.
Since the dough will increase in volume during baking, so that it does not take up the entire mold, it must be rolled out as thin as for pizza.
Choux pastry
From choux pastry, you can bake beautiful hollow products, which, if you cut off the top of the lid, are in no way inferior to store tartlets. For one portion of the test you will need:
- 180 ml of water;
- 60 g butter or margarine;
- 3 eggs;
- 2-3 g of salt;
- 150 g flour.
How to make the dough:
- Pour water into a saucepan with a thick bottom and walls, add a pinch of salt and put butter into pieces. Send everything to the fire and bring to a boil.
- Pour all the flour into the boiling liquid at one time and constantly stirring until it thickens, so that the dough gathers into a lump, and a thin flour film appears on the walls of the dishes.
- Remove the saucepan from heat, let the dough cool until warm, and then stir in the eggs one at a time. More or less may be needed depending on the size. The dough of the correct consistency should be drained from the spatula with a wide ribbon.
- Transfer the dough into a pastry bag or a plastic bag with a cut off corner and place the blanks of future tartlets on a baking sheet.
- Bake until browned at 180 degrees. This will take approximately 25 minutes. Then cool and fill with any filling.
Choux tartlets can be made in the shape of swans. To do this, in addition to round blanks, you also need to bake thin curved "swan necks", which are then simply inserted into a stuffed basket.
Pancake dough
Popovers - Hollow pancake buns are ideal as homemade tartlets. The dough recipe for them is very simple, but the cooking technology has a number of nuances that cannot be ignored.
Test composition:
- 2 eggs;
- 130 ml of milk;
- 40 g melted butter;
- 1 pinch of salt;
- 100-120 g flour.
How to bake pancake dough tartlets:
- From the list of ingredients, knead the pancake dough. All components must be warm.
- Put the metal muffins on a baking sheet in a cold oven, which is heated to the maximum temperature (at least 250 degrees).
- When the oven and molds are hot, quickly grease them, fill them halfway with dough and return to the oven so that they do not have time to cool down.
- After 10 minutes, they will greatly increase and just jump out of the molds, then reduce the temperature to 180 degrees and bake for another 10-15 minutes.
Ready-made tartlets resemble choux pastry blanks, and the neutral taste of the dough goes well with any filling.
Secrets and Tricks
Cooking any dish has its own subtleties and tricks, which are well known to experienced housewives. There are secrets in baking homemade snack baskets:
- To prevent the bottom of shortcrust pastry products from swelling, the blanks can often be chopped with a fork or dried peas or beans can be poured into them.
- Homemade tartlets can be stored in the freezer: from puff and yeast dough - up to 5 days, from shortcrust pastry - up to 30. Before use, they should be thawed at room temperature.
- If you use margarine instead of butter to knead the dough, then you do not need to add salt, there is enough of it in this ingredient.
- Silicone molds should be filled with dough when they are already on the baking sheet, so that when they are transferred from the table, they do not deform.
And finally, it is worth clarifying one more nuance: the dough for tartlets should be prepared only from fresh high-quality ingredients. Neglecting this rule can not only ruin the feast, but also harm your health.
