Lessons in Baking: Mini Top Shelf Rolls

I still had pie crust and custard left over and I had the idea to try to make Em's Honey Custard Tarts as tiny, bite-sized pieces, both to use up the ingredients and also to just attempt those.

In short: turned out just fine.

What I've learned is to be more generous with the dough. I was worried in such a small area that too much dough would either not cook thoroughly enough, or fill too much of the space and not leave room for any of the filling. But, that wasn't the case and they got flake and hard to pull out of the dish without them crumbling.

Still, not too bad and the presentation was even a little nicer with the scalloped tops. I even tried some raspberry preserve filling for a few of them too.

Filling with pie beads before baking

Before going in the oven

Baked and completed

I still need to work on presentation but again, that's not really my focus lately. They turned out fine though.

Lessons in Baking: Top Shelf Rolls

On the advice of Aunt Judee to explore some Top Shelf Rolls recipes, I finally had the chance to explore it (and this comes after me having made pie crust for it weeks ago and freezing it... we've just been so busy lately!) and we chose Em's Honey Custard Tarts, which was a serendipitous way to honor sweet Midna.

I even played around and made my first Instagram reel with this experience. Those things are tedious! And also kinda addicting haha.

So what did I learn this time around... I think my pie crusts were a little thick for the ramekins. To be fair, the recipes calls for a muffin pan, but I wanted to try out the ramekins. I felt they were a great mix of sweet and not (I don't make the pie crusts sweet in any way) and the custard turned out pretty good for a first pass! It needs to be either made thicker or baked longer though, so you could cut it without it running, which wasn't quite the case. And also, garnish goes a long way! Of course, I just made these for us so wasn't too concerned about that, but for future reference. Need to get better at making these prettier.

But, a great first pass at a Top Shelf Roll!