Five-a-day treats: Polka dot asparagus tarts

Ok, so the tarts don't have polka dots on the photo. The point is that this recipe has the potential to have polka dots, but you might have to do the relevant bit yourself and not leave it to your toddler. The Little Chefs got a bit heavy handed with the asparagus bits, but on the plus side, the less than perfect look did not stop them from eating up all these healthy treats!

For 24 tarts

Ingredients:

250 g plain flour
125 g cold butter
1 egg yolk
Pinch of salt
Cold water

Or 250 g shop bought shortcrust pastry

300 g asparagus
300 ml double cream
2 eggs, beaten
100 g Gruyère cheese, grated

Method:

- cut the butter into cubes and mix with the flour with your fingers until it looks like breadcrumbs
- mix in pinch of salt and egg yolk until it comes together as a ball of dough - add a drop of water if necessary
- chill in the fridge for 20 minutes
- or remove packaging from ready made pastry

- preheat oven to 180'C / fan 160'C
- place paper muffin cases into the holes of two muffin trays
- roll out the pastry and cut out circles with a pastry cutter larger than the holes of the muffin tray
- place a pastry circle in each paper case and press them down so they come up at the sides and form a pastry case
- blind bake for 15 minutes

- in the meantime, steam the asparagus for 5 minutes
- puree about half of the asparagus with a stick blender
- chop the remaining asparagus into 1 cm slices
- mix the cream, cheese, eggs and asparagus puree
- spoon the mixture into the blind baked pastry cases
- place a few asparagus slices in each tart, so that the cut (round) ends face upwards
- bake for 20 minutes until golden on top

And a few tips:
- my way of blind baking the tarts was to place baking beans in paper muffin cases and put one on top of each tart - this recipe is pretty fiddly if you do it from scratch, so don't expect your toddler to be eager to participate throughout the whole process: it might be a good idea to make the dough together and then leave it in the fridge and do the filling later
- I'm not sure it's entirely necessary to blind bake: please let me know if you have experience doing it without
- the asparagus has quite a delicate taste, so it works well if you add some extra strong tasting ingredients, such as red onions or bacon - I would fry these before you add them to the filling

*The bold text in the recipe shows the steps that the Little Chefs did (with supervision).*