Italian jam tarts - Crostatine di marmellata

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Jam tarts, Crostatine  in Italian, are small short crust pastry rounds filled with fruit jams, or pastry cream, Nutella etc... When I wan a child they were always there for my breakfast or the afternoon « Merenda » when back from school. 

 

Contrary to the English tea time jam tarts, which normally do not have any pastry topping, the

 " Crostatine " are topped with stripes of short crust pastry as you can see in the pictures. But you can use your imagination and jutst top them as you like, witha pastry hearth for St Valentine, a star for Xmas . I have already posted the home made short crust pastry recipe, you can find it in our « How to Make... » section , it is very easy to prepare specually if you have a food processor and is far better to ready-made you find in crocery shops. I normally use my homemade fruit jam the higher the fruit content, the less the jam will bubble out of the pastry case during the cooking process. 

makes about 12 crostatine

Ingredients:

1 short crust pastry see recipe here

Fruit jam of your choice or pastry cream or Nutella or another chocolate paste

.... That's it! 

Prepare the short crust pastry and place it in the fridge for at least 1/2 hour, to make the crostatine shaping easier, I roll out the pastry like this:

Then I cut a 1/2 cm disc to shape each small tart... you need some samll tart disposable or metal forms. Shape the tart and fill with jam... whatever you like. Preheat your oven on 200C° (392F°)

I used apricot, strawberries jam and pastry cream.

With the leftover pastry shape some stripes (I use the ravioli cutter...) and decorate the top of the tarts (see picture above). Take off the exeeding pastry from the borders. Place in the preheated oven for 15 to 25 minutes, depend on your oven... when the tarts start getting lightly coloured, they are ready! 

Important : do not overcook otherwise the tarts gets too dry and hard!

The Crostatine are ready! Get your tea ready and call your children.....buon appetito!!!