Quick Little Tarts

I was looking for an easy but tasty treat to make my oldest son and my brother who are helping me out today. This fit it perfectly.

I used frozen pie crusts and not refrigerated ones due to time. Locally all the refrigerated ones contain artificial dyes (yellow and others) and I didn’t want to drive a couple of towns over to the nearest natural foods stores just for them. The frozen ones that the local mega mart carries at least don’t contain that. (and on making my own pastry….there is one thing I am not good at. Pie crust. Ha.)

Quick Little Tarts

Ingredients:

• 2 frozen pie crusts, thawed
• jam

Glaze

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• natural dye, if desired

Directions:

Heat the oven to 425° and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Pull the thawed pie crusts out of the tins, toss those in the recycling bin. One crust at a time, on a lightly floured surface, roll out. Cut sections that are 3″ long and 2″ wide. Re-roll and keep cutting. I got 24 pieces total plus two larger ones that I hand formed. Use as little flour as possible so your pastry doesn’t get tough.

Lay out half of the pieces on the baking sheets (6 per sheet). Add 1 tsp of jam in the middle. Cover with another piece of pastry, crimp with a fork on all side and gently poke the tines of the fork into the tops a couple of times each. Bake for 8 to 12 minutes, or until golden brown. Take out and let rest for a minute or two, then promptly move to a cooling rack to prevent steaming.

For the larger ones I made with the pastry scraps I patted them out, filled with 2 or teaspoons of jam, folded over and crimped. These baked for 12 minutes by themselves at the end.

To make the glaze –

I wanted different colors so I could tell which tarts were blueberry and which were strawberry so I took 1/4 cup of the powdered sugar and put it into a small bowl, doing this twice. The 3rd bowl had 1/2 cup of sugar. I slowly added just enough water to make a drizzleable glaze. To one small bowl I added yellow, the other orange. The large bowl was white. Do you need the dye? Not at all, I just happened to have my favorite natural dyes on hand!

Once the glaze is ready use a fork or spoon to quickly drizzle it on top. I did the colored glaze first, let it set up for a couple of minutes and then did white over it as well.

Made 14 tarts.

~Sarah

Tarts