Butter Free Butter Tarts

For Paul's father's birthday I was given the task of making his favourite dessert, butter tarts. Instead of a birthday cake, we were going to have a variety of his favourite treats, and I was nervous! I'm not very good at pastry and I didn't want to arrive empty handed at a birthday party. I also wanted to make a butter tart that I could eat as well, so a dairy free butter tart was what I set out to do.

The tarts ended up being a combination of two recipes, the pastry shell from one site and the filling from the other. The pastry was really easy to make. Probably the easiest pastry I've attempted so far. I ended up making two batches of the pastry. The first one I refrigerated for 30 minutes, and the second I used right away since I was pressed for time. The second batch I rolled between two sheets of waxed paper so it wouldn't stick. I used a circle cutter and then placed the pastry rounds into a regular sized muffin tin. The recipe for the pastry can be found here, on About.com.

The filling was super simple to make. You just throw all of the ingredients into a bowl, stir it around and fill the pastry shells. Easy peasy! I was surprised to find that a treat called butter tarts had very little butter in them. I substituted margarine for the butter in the filling recipe. The filling recipe can be found on the website called Canadian Home and Country. I made three versions of tarts, walnut, raisin and plain. I filled all of the shells and sprinkled raisins or walnuts on top. My favourite were the plain ones.

When I was looking up recipes, I found that butter tarts are a uniquely Canadian treat! Pretty cool! The tarts went over really well. I'm going to have to make them again sometime because not everyone at the party got to try them because some people were going back for seconds and thirds!