Contest Winner, Melktert, and a Friend

Thank you all for stopping by and entering my little giveaway and thank you so much to you who shared your GF&DF recipes, I really appreciate that. It was awesome to hear your stories and what you'd do with the GC, but unfortunately I only have one to give out. After tallying up the entries and feeding them to random.org, the winner is Melinda!

Melinda, I left a message for you over at your blog. Please shoot me an email and I'll get you the redemption information right away. As for the rest of you, don't worry. I'm planning on a lot more giveaways in the weeks to come, so stick around, you never know what you'll get.

And while you're here, how can I possibly let you go without a recipe? A few weeks ago, or was it months? Wow, the time really has whipped through the last few months...anyways, a few whatevers ago I was invited to a little celebration at a friends house and she requested that I make a milk tart. A what what? A South African dish called a melktert, also known as a milk tart. I had no clue what the heck it was but I promised to have one in hand when I showed up. I dug around online and almost all the recipes sounded basically the same until I found Cook Sister! I liked that she lightened her tart and messed with the flavors a bit by adding cardamom, and while in the end I learned that I'd probably prefer the more traditional shortbread crust to the puff pastry, despite it's humble looks, the filling was really really REALLY good.



Melktert
Recipe adapted from Cook Sister!
I didn't have custard powder handy and I wanted a tiny bit stronger cardamom flavor so I tossed in an extra pod, other then that I left the recipe untouched.

about 200g of ready rolled puff pastry
1.5 cups milk
1 tsp butter
a pinch of salt
1 cinnamon stick
2 green cardamom pods
1.5 tsp cornstarch
1.5 tsp cake flour
1 Tbsp cold milk
1/4 cup sugar
2 eggs, separated
1/4 tsp almond extract (optional)
sugar mixed with a little ground cinnamon

- Pre-heat the oven to 400F and line a 9 inch fluted pie dish with the puff pastry, leaving the edges raggedy and hanging over the edge of the dish. Bake the shell for 10 minutes to get it cooking. I skipped this step and the bottom of my shell wasn't quite cooked through when the custard was ready...there was some rather creative pie frying that had to happen after that to finish off the bottom, so please, listen to me and don't skip this step.
- Bring the milk to a slow boil in a medium saucepan, then add the butter, salt, cinnamon stick and cardamom pod.
- Combine the cornflour and cake flour and add the cold milk to make a paste. Stir a little of the hot milk into the paste to thin it, then stir the custard paste into the hot milk in the saucepan. Make sure there are no lumps in the paste - and don't panic too much if there are some lumps in the saucepan once you've added the custard - just make sure you stir vigorously and continuously to get them to dissolve.
- Add 2 Tbsp of the sugar and stir/whisk continuously. When the custard thickens, remove it from the heat and discard the cinnamon and cardamom.
- Beat the egg whites until stiff, then beat in the remaining sugar gradually and set aside. Beat the yolks slightly and then add about 2 Tbsp of the warm custard mix to the yolks and mix well.
- Stir the yolk mix into the custard saucepan and add the almond essence (if using). Gently fold in the egg whites.
- Pour into the pie dish, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar and bake at 400F for 10 minutes. Then turn the heat down to 350F and bake for a further 10-15 mins, until puffed up and golden.
- Allow to cool on a wire rack, or in your car on the way to the party, slice and enjoy!



And just to see if you're all paying attention (or even reading this far down in the post), I'd like to share with you my friend the croc:



I've been looking for a smooth lead-in to share him with you for a while, mostly because I really like how this picture came out, and I've basically given up. So here he is. He didn't get any of the tart, but I'm pretty sure he'd have liked it. Go on, bake some yourself. Make him jealous.