Blueberry Cream Cheese Tarts with Graham Cracker Crust

When I first bought the book this was the one recipe that I knew I needed to try. Others had already raved about it and my good friend L even picked it out and said, "This looks damn good. You have to make it for me." It took me longer than I liked to finally get down to it simply because the whole wheat pastry flour that the recipe calls for isn't available in regular supermarkets here. I couldn't even find it in my baking supplies store (which doesn't say very much for it, come to think of it).

I finally found it in a humble little supermarket somewhere in Bangkok where I spent the weekend some time ago visiting a friend who was doing a baking course there. Of course when I came home and did a post about it, several lovely people left messages to tell me where I could find the pastry flour in Singapore (thanks guys!). Apparently I just hadn't looked hard enough.

Anyway, these are the results of my long-awaited tarts. They aren't the prettiest tarts in the world, but they sure were tasty. As the recipe suggested, I tried rolling the pastry to 1/8-inch thick, but it kept falling apart on me and refused to form a neat sheet that could be laid over my tart tin. I ended up pressing the pastry (like you would a biscuit crust on a cheesecake) into the tin and baked them blind. On a larger tart tin (I used 12cm-diameter ones), the pastry turned out thicker than I liked and the tart was a bit of a mess to eat—cream cheese custard oozing all over the plate and blueberries tumbling willy nilly. Indeed, not a disaster, but it could definitely be better. Plus as a dessert portion for one, a 12cm tart was kinda huge.

I then remembered these little boat-shape moulds that were part of a collection of baking tins my recently passed uncle left to me. These are quite wee (10cm long and 5cm at its widest), but they turned out tarts that could downed in just two bites. As you can see from the picture, I still haven't gotten the hang of the pastry, though it was easier to press in a thinner layer. But, as the saying goes, practice makes perfect. And since the tarts were fabulous taste-wise, there certainly is an impetus to try and try again.