Lemon tarts

I love lemon. It's probably my favourite flavour to bake with, along with chocolate. These particular lemon tarts are not the kind with pastry and just a lemon filling. They are more like little lemon cakes inside a pastry shell. 

But before you go any further, I need to confess that I don't "do" pastry. That is to say, I don't make it from scratch. In all honesty, it's pure laziness. I just can't be bothered. Especially when the pastry blocks you can buy in the supermarket are so good. I don't generally buy pre-prepared things, but pastry is the major exception. My mum always makes pastry from scratch for pies, tarts and so on, and is generally horrified by my pastry purchasing. Oh well, the fact that Mary Berry has said that she has used ready made pastry makes me feel better! What's good for Mary, is good for me!

I often make these lemon tarts for afternoon tea with friends, because they are just the right size to pick up and eat in a few bites. They are made from a shortcrust pastry shell with lemon curd filling, topped with cake and then lemon icing. They are little lemony bites of goodness!

Ingredients
(makes 16)

150g shortcrust pastry (home-made or shop bought. Shop bought needs leaving at room temp for a while before using.)
115g butter
115g caster sugar
115g self-raising flour
2 eggs
16 tsp of lemon curd
85g icing sugar
lemon juice (from a bottle or squeezed from lemons)
Yellow sprinkles (optional- Lakeland and Dr.Oetker both do yellow ones)

Method

1) Mix the butter and the sugar together until it's creamy.
2) Beat the eggs into the mixture and then sieve in the flour.
3) Mix until you have quite a thick cake batter.
4) Dust a surface with flour and roll the pastry out until it's 1 cm thick at the most.
5) Use a circle cutter to cut out the tarts and put the circles into a lightly greased tart tin.
6) Put a teaspoon of lemon curd into the centre of each one.
7) Put a heaped teaspoon of cake batter on top of each one and slightly spread it to cover  the curd (it will spread more in the oven).

8) Put in the oven at 180 (160 fan), Gas mark 4,  for 10-12 mins until the cake batter has risen and turned slightly golden.
9) The tarts should slide out easily. Put them on a cooling wrack.
10) In a small bowl, mix the icing sugar with a little lemon juice at a time until you have a very thick consistency. If it goes too runny, add more icing sugar.
11) When cool, spoon a little of the icing onto each tart.
12) Add sprinkles if desired. Make sure you add them when the icing's wet though, or they'll just roll off!

They are quite sweet, but just the thing as an afternoon treat with a cuppa!