I have been planning to create my own take on lemon curd tartelettes ever since I first ate a lemon tarte once during a holiday in the UK, where I absolutely fell in love with those tangy-sweet delights! So long story short: You have to try them – I promise you, you will nto regret it!
Note: You can always replace the homemade tarte shells with storebought shortcrust pastry, it will safe you quite a lot of time.

Ingredients (for 12 tartelettes, muffin mould size):

Tarte Shells:
200g flour
50g sugar
1/4 teaspoon of salt
100g butter (cold and in pieces)
1 whole egg (medium size)
1-2 tablespoons of water
eggwash (1 whisked egg)
or: 1 sheet of storebought shortcrust pastry

Filling:
2 eggs (whisked, for one of them, use the eggwash from before)
2 egg yolks
140g sugar
Zest of 2 lemons (grated)
Juice of 2-3 lemons (ca. 1.2 dl)
130g of Butter (in pieces)

Decoration:
10g of white chocolate (finely chopped)

Preparation:

Tarte Shells:
For the dough, mix flour, salt and sugar and add the butter pieces. Finely grate the dough with your fingers until it is crumbly.
Pour the beaten egg into the bowl with a tablespoon of water. If the egg is small, add a second tablespoon of water. However, I would tend to recommend adding only one tablespoon of water first, as the dough won’t roll out if it’s too wet.
Put all the ingredients together and form a round dough, kneading as little as possible. Cover and leave to cool for 30 minutes.

Then roll out the dough between two baking papers to a thickness of approx. 2 mm. Cut out 12 circles (they should be slightly larger than the muffin moulds to create a rim of about 1-2 cm high.
Line the muffin moulds with cupcake cups (paper) and press the dough circles in. Pierce the bottom of the moulds with a fork. Cool again for 10-15 minutes. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 200 degrees.

Cover the muffin moulds with a second layer of cupcake cups and weigh them down with dried pulses for blind baking (I use dried chickpeas that I store separately in a jar in order to (re-)use whenever I need to blind bake something). Blind baking helps to keep the dough nice and flat and the cupcake moulds create a nice dough. Bake for about 15-17 minutes.
Take out and remove the pulses and the top layer of cupcake papers. Coat the bottoms of the tarte shells with eggwash and bake again for 2 minutes. This helps to ensure that the filling does not soak the base of the dough. Remove and allow to cool. Note: You will only need a bit of eggwash for this step, so keep the whisked egg for the filling.

Filling:
Take the eggwash from before and whisk in another 1 egg and 2 eggyolks. If you use storebought pastry, just mix 2 eggs and 2 eggyolks. In a metal bowl, mix the eggs with the grated lemon cest, lemon juice and sugar. Place the mixture over a hot water bath (the bowl should not touch the simmering water) and keep whisking. After 1-2 minutes, start adding the pieces of butter one by one. Whisk over the hot water bath until the mixture thickens and forms a viscous cream.

Pour the cream into the tarte shells and let cool for 5 minutes.
Chop the white chocolate and decorate your shells. Afterwards, let the tartelettes cool for 1-2 hours…

…and enjoy!!