Making Pineapple Tarts for Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year is here again, and this year's preparation involved making some pineapple tarts. Nowadays, you can order these and many other types of cookies. However, the whole things has become quite commercial. Over the years, cookies have become increasingly more expensive (latest price is ~RM0.50 per piece!). If you know how, factoring in the cost of the raw materials, it actually isn't so bad to make your own cookies.

In this sitting, we set about making some pineapple tarts. The preparation actually began much earlier, as we had to make the pineapple jam that goes into the center of the tarts. It was a lot of hard work, and was worked on exclusively by my mother-in-law. Some 20 pineapples were processed in the kitchen (that's quite a lot, for normal standards).

Pineapple jam that makes up the filling

Now, in the good old days, you had to mash all the ingredients together to make the dough with your bare hands (which was probably easier back then when people practiced kung fu for exercise). Thankfully, science has made our lives easier with the introduction of a breadmaker, which did more than just bake bread. There's actually a setting to prepare pizza dough, which was perfect for beating the butter, flour, etc.. which make up the ingredients for the pineapple tart dough.

The trusty Kenwood breadmaker

End result - you still need to mash it properly with hands though....

Once ready, we use some form of tool to form the dough into strips that have patterns on one side. It's actually a plastic tube, open on one end and with an aperture on the other, which serves to shape the dough when it is pushed out using a plunger, which is inserted into the other end.

Finally, the dough is ready for injection into strips using plastic tool (white plunger at the top)

After carefully laying down a strip of dough, we insert a ball of pineapple jam filling on the strip, and roll it up, cutting off the dough just as it completes one round. I found that instead of rolling the pineapple jam filling into a ball, it's better to shape it into a cylinder using my fingers (all that time spent playing with clay in my younger years seems to have paid off finally). That way, the jam fits the dough perfectly when rolled up.

One by one, the rolled up tarts are placed into a metal tray. Once full, the top of the tarts are glazed with egg yolk, before placing into a preheated oven. Temperature setting and time are based on estimation and gut feeling - I was too preoccupied with rolling up the tarts to perform accurate measurement of time (and I also did not have a thermocouple to measure the actual temperature of the oven).

Tarts ready for glazing with egg yolk and then into the oven they go...!

Well, while my brother-in-law, kids, and I rolled up the tarts, my sister-in-law and wife glazed and baked them, taking them out and packing them before passing us the empty metal trays to start all over.

I was at it for half a day, but the rest of them continued through to late evening where they managed to complete the entire batch!

A simple oven does the job - no fancy electronic displays or timers....

Well, delicious cookies are ready to eat! Another successful adventure in the kitchen...!

Ohhh, yeeessss!!!