Sklandu Rauši - Latvian Carrot Tarts - GUEST POST

One of our regular customers, Inese from Latvia, makes the most scrummy looking things and often sends us photos.

These little carrot tarts are one of her latest and Inese has kindly sent me the recipe and photos which you can find below. These are made in a 12 hole standard silicone bakeware muffin / cupcake mould.

I am sending you the recipe of those carrot filled tarts! I make them without any grams or milligrams, just "on eye and taste", but there are some amounts named just not to be too approximate. but you know - cooking is the art of practice!

Latvian meal: Sklandu rauši - rye crust little tarts with carrot filling.

They’re not very sweet, relying primarily on the natural sweetness of carrots, but can be made as sweet as one likes.

There are a lot of variations, including potato versions and mixed-potato/carrot versions, but this time I went with 100% carrot.

tart base:

250 g rye flour

100 g warm water

sugar

salt
30 g butter or margarine.

Sift flour onto a pastry board, rub through butter or margarine. Melt sugar and salt into water, add and knead into a stiff dough that can be easily rolled.

Carrot Filling:

400 g carrots, peeled and cut into large chunks

50 g sugar

salt
25 g sour cream

2 eggs

15 – 25 g flour

vanilla bean

Boil carrots until tender. Drain well and pat dry. Chop in a food processor, food mill or ricer (I like when it is more rough, with small pieces of carrots). Combine sugar, salt, sour cream, eggs, vanilla seeds and flour with the carrots. If your carrot fill comes out overly wet, you may need more flour or to drain off a bit of the carrot juice so that it is somewhat dry.

Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 200oC.

Preparing the tarts.

Take muffin silicone mould. Using your fingers, fill each hole with a little ball of dough and roll it as thin as possible making “baskets”.

Bake for a while, some 5-10 minutes, until they become somewhat hard.

Spoon the carrot mixture into each little dough “basket” until it almost reaches the top. Bake for 10 – 15 minutes until the dough is crumbly and the carrot filling is browned a little.

Then take out of silicone and brush each top with beaten egg, mixed with sugar and sour cream, put into oven without silicone for some another 5-10 minutes to make the dough crispy from the bottom as well.