Rice Pudding Tart

A little home comfort during a chaotic week

Hi. Hello. Happy New Year!

I hope you had a wonderful break over the holiday season and baked some delicious things, I saw a lot of you making the mint chocolate torte recipe which made me very happy, its so lovely to be a small part of your Christmas celebrations! My own Christmas involved a lot of travel and a lot of cooking and, less traditionally, lots of packing. After an impossibly long and drawn out process we finally sold our flat and are moving house (if anyone can explain the logic of the ridiculous English property system, I am all ears). Considering we had almost given up on the process and felt like it was doomed to never happen, it felt almost surprising when everything finally fell into place days before Christmas. That has meant we have been very busy packing everything up and getting ready for the big move. That, coupled with my looming book deadline (which happens to be the same day we move house, because why not make things twice as hard), meant I accidentally had a bit of a break from baking over the Christmas period, only making the mint chocolate torte for family on Christmas day.

To get back into the swing of things, I wanted something relatively simple but also something really comforting. It also needed to be something I could make with what I had on hand, I didn’t want to buy any more ingredients I would just have to pack up and move to the new place, I wanted to see if I could use up ingredients from the back of my cupboard. I also wanted to make something that needed minimal equipment. As I was sorting out the cupboards I found an almost empty bag of pudding rice and thought about just making a big batch of rice pudding and calling it a day. Rice pudding is an almost perfect comfort food, but I’ve already given you my rice pudding recipe. Yet, the idea of rice pudding lodged itself in my brain and it was like I couldnt think of anything else, and then I remembered rice pudding tarts. There a few varieties out there, Italy has Budini di Riso from Florence and Belgium has Rijsttaart. The Belgian version starts with a yeasted pastry and a simple rice pudding filling which is brushed with egg so the finished tart has a lightly burnished look. The Italian version is simpler made with a shortcrust pastry and a rice pudding filling. My version is most like the Italian version but crossed with an English custard tart, baked so the filling is silky and incredibly creamy. My rice pudding is made with lots of milk and cream which is cooked slowly until the rice is cooked and liquid reduced so that the pudding is rich like double cream. It is flavoured simply with vanilla but could be boosted with all manner of spicing. To set the filling, eggs are mixed into the finished pudding and the whole thing is then baked, at low temperature, so that it sets like silky, rice studded, custard.

This simple version can be adapted in many ways, you could make it a little like a Bakewell tart and line the base of the pastry case with jam before adding the rice pudding. The pudding could be flavoured in much more extravagant ways, you could make a caramel infused pudding, fold through rum soaked raisins, you could make a coconut version using coconut milk in the rice pudding and coating the finished tart with a white blanket of dessicated cocoanut. You could do many things but there is something to said about simplicity and, surrounded by the chaos of packing up my house, simplicity and comfort was exactly what I needed. To serve, I had some leftover raspberries that needed using so served those alongside a slide of the tart.

Question: Next week I am moving into a new house with a new kitchen and a very dated oven. What is your first bake for a new oven?

Note: Pudding rice seems to be a quirk of British cooking, I cant see it sold anywhere else in the world. The rice in these bags is not unique to the British Isles, it is simply a variety of short grain that works particularly well in the dessert. Rice pudding was clearly popular enough at some point in the past that supermarkets or rice manufacturers started marketing bags of rice specifically for making rice pudding. You could always find this type of rice in any large UK supermarket but it does seem like its falling out of favour, possibly being seen as old fashioned, and being less releiably available. Thankfully you can make this rice pudding recipe with any short grain rice.