Butter Tarts Bake-Off

On Friday I came across this ad:

3rd Annual Great BC Bake-Off
Think you’ve got superior baking skills?
Prove it in our amateur baking contest!
Enter all three categories or just one.

1. Fruit Pie – any kind of fruit cherry, peach, apple, berry etc.
2. Open – anything goes within the outlined rules – entries must not require refrigeration
3. Butter Tarts  – this is a Canadian competition after all!

How could I possibly resist? Answer: I couldn't. My first thought was to enter all three categories, but that I actually had plans last weekend so I didn't really have time to do a bake-a-thon. For some strange reason I decided on butter tarts. I don't even really like butter tarts. I am not a pastry person. It's a guilt laden confection full of butter, or as I found out in my preceding research, lard - more on this later.

It's tart time. *Rubs hands together excitedly*. Normally I would go straight to google, but this, this is butter tarts. Butter tarts are an old people thing (and I say that affectionately). This is a grandma recipe - I phone her immediately. Her phone is busy. sigh. Three minutes later, she calls me back at work - the old broad has call display! I ask Nancy for her recipe, which she digs up and recites for me. The pastry recipe is my great grandma's. Apparently she was a great and avid baker. Must be where I got my mad skills from. My grandma then tells me she almost always just uses pre-made, frozen tart shells - such an ungradma move ***Face Palm*** twenty-five minutes of chit chat with grandma and I am armed with a butter tart recipe that looks deceivingly simple. I get scared and turn to google to counter research. At the same time I throw out some feelers in the office to see who has butter tart experience, advice or preference - there are lots of takers and I file their comments under 'uninformed nonsence'.

My research results pretty much showed that butter tart recipes are all fairly similar. There are only a few ingredients, so the amounts range slightly and there is a grand debate on whether or not adding nuts in is OK. I immediately, without a second thought, deemed nuts a Yes - pecans are god's gift to baking. In regards to pastry, all signs pointed me in the direction of the Tenderflake Pastry Recipe. It's as old as the hills (total grandma saying) aka tried, tested and true. For those of you who don't know- tenderflake is a brand of Lard. LARD! I've spent 25+ years avoiding lard. I don't even know, or want to know what it consists of. The fact that it doesn't need to be refrigerated, is colorless and mostly tasteless are enough for me to kill any and all Lard-yearnings. However, I sometimes must concede my snot-face and just bite the bullet and join the masses in their lardy lifestyles.

I borrowed Mom's tart tins, I believe they were wedding gifts to her 33 years ago. I thought it was kind of neat that I was using vintage tins to bake an old family tart recipe (kind of). Turns out old pans suck- they are not non-stick. Insert super aggrieved face. My first three dozen- that's 36 bloody tarts - stuck to the stupid vintage tart tins. I probably spent 1.5 hours rolling, cutting and filling those old, ugly tins. I even used an adorable flower shaped cookie cutter. Imagine the horror at having to scrape these pretty confections out of the tins - losing all the delicious crust of which I had so deliciately placed. IMAGINE! you probably can't. that's okay- I live that nightmare over and over again, certainly enough for the both of us. Following my scrape fest I went to bed.  By this time it was midnight. and I was tarted out.

6am, Saturday morning - up and at'em. I took my wonderfully chilled dough and grabbed my non-stick muffin tins and made fast work of three more batches. I even tried a batch in my new SQUARE individual brownie pan. they all came out lovely. I delivered some to neighbour Wendy and downstairs neighbour Cam. I dropped a dozen off for my parents, complete with my mom's tart tins. I packaged two dozen up to take to work on Monday and one more dozen to go to Nick's. I left a few at my house and set six aside for the Bake Off, of which I was now wavering on. Somewhere during this process, I realized that i might not be ready for a butter tart bake off. I mean, there's people who have been baking butter tarts for 30 years. I've only done one batch. True, everyone who ate them gave them a 10+ rating, but people are liars. I decided to bow out of the competition this time. I am officially on the lard bandwagon though and plan to perfect my pastry over the next little while. Pies, anyone?