Alpha Bakers: Hungarian Raisin Walnut Tartlets

I love this pie. They are fun to put together, even though they take a heck of a lot longer than I had anticipated. The recipe reads pretty easy. Make 3x the recipe of a standard pie shell. I want to make 1/2 recipe so that means 1.5x recipe. Easy to figure out since the recipe is in grams. The pie dough came together pretty quickly. Then I read through the filling part and start mis-en-place all the parts, including roasting the walnuts. It does add a bit of to do the roasting, but I think using pre-roasted nuts adds so much more flavor in the baked result. Now the kicker in the process is the rolling of the dough. Having to roll and cut at least a dozen 4 1/2 inches circle takes FOREVER! I was glad I only made 1/2 recipe. In the end I had enough filling for 14 tartlets so I made 14 circles and had some dough leftover so they went to the freezer for future use. Btw, I now have 3 different pie dough leftover so I see a small pie in my future hehe.

I used 100% Whole Wheat Pastry flour in the dough and used almond milk instead of regular milk in the filling. We don't drink regular milk anymore so I have been subbing with almond milk and so far I have had no issue.

I also reduced the sugar by 10% in this recipe. Not that this recipe used a ton of sugar but raisins are really sweet. Even with the reduction, they are too sweet for my taste, so I ate 1/2 of them at a time. It is really good though. And my friends who I shared them with loved them. No mention of too sweet.

Step by step photos:

 

Ahh.. pretty shot of flour (I used 100% Whole Wheat Pastry flour) and a heck of a lot of fat *grin*.

Mix the cream cheese onto flour. I used my hands. I love it this way.

Then add the chopped butter.

Looks cornmeal-ly.

I have freeze leftover heavy cream in ice cubes container. They are great for recipes like these because I don't have to buy a whole tub of cream. I used a couple of cubes of them for this dough.

Stored in a pyrex container.

Meanwhile, toast the walnuts and rub the in a towel to get rid of the skin.

That's a lot of skin!

Next, roll the dough. Sigh...I will never master rolling the dough evenly. Mine looks like an island somewhere. No harm loss though. Just makes for a funny picture :).

Make the filling. Combine milk, sugar, eggs, vanilla in the mixer bowl. Appreciate the prettiness of all the colors for a few seconds...

before it turned into this with the butter addition. Yikes. This is so not looking appetizing! But I'm glad Rose warned us about this in the recipe.

I think my butter might be a bit too cold as it looked pretty curdled. But it all will melt in the oven.

Yum!

Alpha Bakers is a group of bakers who are baking through The Baking Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum's latest cookbook. Come check out the rest of the group at Rose's Alpha Bakers.