Mini Jam Cups

This week is National Afternoon Tea Week, which makes me want to spend the whole week in a floaty dress surrounded by pretty china and delicate tasty morsels of this, that and the other, preferably sat in a shady spot of a sun-drenched garden.

However – sadly – I can’t do that, but . . . I have come up with three alternatives for afternoon tea that are a little different from scones, sandwiches, victoria sponge and copious buckets of tea. Not that there is anything wrong with any of those things, I would like to add, but it is sometimes good to ring the changes.

Today we have jam cups, and a little teeny-tiny confession.

They were meant to be mini jam tarts, but . . . the pastry was seriously not playing the game. Like, majorly not playing the game. As in I almost, almost completely lost my temper with it and stomped out the kitchen like a 5-year-old. I did tell it to p-off when it broke on me for the umpteenth time (yes, I frequently talk to inanimate objects). Until . . . I came up with the idea of rolling it into little balls, dropping them into the mini muffin pan and pressing down the middle with the thin end of the bashing part of a pestle and mortar – it doesn’t matter how many times I google it, I can never ever remember which is the pestle and which is the mortar. Is the bowl the mortar? Anyway . . . it worked, although they do look a little ‘rustic’, but hey.

Hence the name jam cups, rather than tarts.

I don’t know if it was the addition of buckwheat flour to the pastry mix that caused it to misbehave. It was cracking like a demon – which is still a little evident in the photos of these cups – despite using a bucket load of water. Or maybe it was because the weather was actually quite warm and with the oven on the kitchen was heating up nicely and the pastry could have been drying out too quickly. Which probably wasn’t helped by the fact that my hands, for once in my life, were also warm instead of their usual ice-like state.

Whatever the reason, I managed to find a way around it. And the addition of the buckwheat flour  seemed to turn the pastry into more of a biscuit like consistency when baked, which works pretty well – biscuit cups filled with jam, what’s not to love?!

The pastry / biscuit cups aren’t overly sweet either, which helps to balance everything out given the intense sweetness of the jam.

I always remember jam tarts being made when there was some leftover pastry from another recipe. What do you do when there is too much pastry to throw away? Jam tarts were answer. Except at Christmas, then it has to be mince pies. However these little jewel-filled beauties deserve to be made in their own right!