Tomato, Feta and Parsley Tarts

I discovered that the Junior Bake Off applications are open for this year... 😱🥳🎉 slightly terrifying but also amazing.  So I've decided to cook some things that I don't usually make, to increase my chances of getting on. I do a lot of cakes and desserts, so I decided I should make some more pastry and some more bread, as well as biscuits if I have time... 

I've been very organized and made a list - for pastry, I want to make more rough puff, puff and shortcrust as I haven't done a lot of those before. I also want to make some breakfast rolls and a big loaf of bread in a bread basket. 

(By the way, this post isn't part of my JBO challenge.)

These tomato tarts were really just using stuff we had in the fridge - we had a lot of tomatoes and feta cheese, so I just put it in. It was more about the pastry, to be honest. I used a BBC food recipe which you can find here. My mum always says that life's too short to make pastry, but I always find it fun to make - rolling it out, and waiting for it to come out of the fridge.

The first thing I had to do was make the pastry, and that was relatively easy. You have to stir the butter into the flour and water in chunks, and I love how the butter goes all streaky in the dough when you roll it out. While the pastry was chilling in the fridge, I roasted the tomatoes in the oven with some oil and balsamic vinegar. They came out smelling amazing!

When the pastry had done all the chilling it needed, I rolled it out and cut it into 6 squares. I divided the tomatoes equally between the squares, and then I scored a 1cm border around the edge of the pastry. This means that the pastry should puff up around the edges, but the bit in the middle shouldn't, as it is being held down by the weight of the tomatoes. I also crumbled some feta onto the tomatoes, to give it more flavour.

I don't like cheese AT ALL and I find it gross, but I couldn't remember what feta tasted like, so I tried some. It's disgusting. So I left a couple without feta on, and they were just as delicious 😉.

I baked them for about 10-15 mins at 180°C, and when I got them out, they were literally swimming in butter. Literally. I did some research, and it turns out that the pastry was too warm before it went in the over - you need to chill it just before you put it in.

We ate them for lunch, and they were delicious; just a bit to big. They are so buttery that it makes it hard to eat a whole one, so if I made them again I would probably make them smaller. I also would roast more tomatoes - I didn't quite do enough, so the weight wasn't enough to stop the middles puffing up! Overall, though, they were delicious and surprisingly easy to make - if you don't want to make your own pastry, you can just use shop-bought for an quick, easy, tasty lunch!