New Year Goodies II

The next thing I made for new year was Pineapple Tarts.  Essentially, this is a cookie with a jam paste centre.  It's popular with Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesians during the Chinese New Year.  I tried these last year after some blog-surfing as I like pineapple.  This year I made the pineapple jam myself from fresh pineapple as opposed to tinned which I did last year.  The flavour is much better.

There are many, many recipes for these out there on the internet and different shapes too.  Some are sausage roll like where the pineapple paste is encased in a rolled pastry which has been squeezed from a pastry press leaving lines over the pastry surface.  Indonesians call it Nastar.  Others are completely encased in pastry and perhaps shaped into oranges with a clove as the stalk or into animal shapes. 

I tried a piped version but it wasn't very successful as the dough is firm and my piping nozzle too fine.  The butter in the dough began to melt with the force of my squeezing and didn't look that good.  Plus, it was really hard work!  Eventually, I settled on rolling the dough out and cutting flower shapes out with a cookie cutter.  I made indentations with a spoon and filled the centres with a blob of pineapple paste. 

I have seen a recipe for melting moments which are piped into pretty rosettes.  I need to get a bigger star nozzle before I make them and I imagine they will be quite tasty with the sweet sharp gooeyness of pineapple paste!