Vanilla Tarts (Vanilletörtchen)

They are easy to prepare and taste excellent.  The shells are made of puff pastry with vanilla pudding filling inside.  This time, I used my silicone muffin cups instead of the normal muffins baking tray. This resulted in easy removal of the tarts with a perfect shape.

Ingredients (yields about 16 pieces):
400 g frozen puff pastry (to be thawed) or 1 1/2 roll of fresh puff pastry

250 ml fresh cream
250 ml fresh milk
1 vanilla pod, the seeds to be scrapped

50 ml fresh milk
1 packet vanilla pudding
75 g sugar
2 egg yolks

icing sugar

Method:
In a bowl, mix together 50 ml fresh milk, vanilla pudding, sugar and egg yolks together.  Mix thoroughly until there are no lumps.  In a saucepan, add fresh cream, fresh milk and the scrapped vanilla seeds.  Bring to boil.  Once mixture starts to boil lightly, add the bowl mixture and mix well with a whisk.  Let it boil for a few minutes before removing to a plastic bowl.  Set aside to cool down.

By using a 9 cm round cutter, cut circles of puff pastry.  Line each silicone muffin cup.  If using muffin baking tray, grease the moulds with butter before lining with puff pastry.  Repeat until all 16 silicone muffin cups are lined with pastry.

Preheat conventional ofen to 220° C - please do not use your fan oven.  Then, add about 2 tbsp of vanilla pudding into each muffin cup.  Arrange muffin cups on a baking tray.

Place baking tray on the lowest rack of oven and bake for about 20 minutes.  Once done, remove from oven and let it cool for a while before removing tarts from the silicone moulds.

Sprinkle with icing sugar before serving.

Happy Baking!