This is a delicious recipe I Frankensteined out of a few staples. These tarts are ideal for Mother’s Day dessert, a tea party, a brunch, or simply as a tasty dessert to enjoy fresh fruit with! The filling and the crust themselves are not particularly sweet, this really allows for the fresh fruit to be the natural shining star in this dessert.
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Cream Cheese Sugar Cookie Tarts
Side note: you can use the filling of this recipe in premade/store bought pastry shells.
Ingredients for crust:
2/3 cup Crisco
¾ cup sugar
1 Tbs vanilla
1 egg
1 Tbs milk
2 cups flour (plus a little for flouring a surface for rolling out dough)
Preheat oven to 375ᵒ.
In a standing mixer beat Crisco, sugar, and vanilla.
Add egg and milk and mix. Slowly add in the flour.
Roll out on a floured surface and cut into desired size/shape. Since I was using 4” tart tins I upcycled an empty (large) tomato sauce can to cut our the circled for my tart crusts. I then placed them in the tart tins and smoothed the edges of the dough into the scalloped edges of the tins.
*You will have extra dough. I made 6 tart tins worth, then 2 more for a total of eight (I only have six tins so I had to do this in batches), then I cut cookies out of the remaining dough -for snackin’.*
Place the tins on a cookie sheet and bake for 9 minutes.
*If you bake cookies from the extra dough only bake them for SEVEN (7) minutes!*
After the tarts came out of the oven and cooled for a few minutes I used a potholder and a bottle of honey to pop the bottoms out of the tart tins, then used a fingernail to get the bottom of the tin off the underside of the crust.
Leave to cool on a cooling rack.
*Need to get some tart tins? These are the ones I have.*
Ingredients for the filling:
1 8oz package of cream cheese
1 14oz can of Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk
1/3 cup lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla
In a standing mixer beat the cream cheese. Add the Eagle Brand and mix on the lowest setting. Add the vanilla and the lemon juice. Slowly increase the speed of the mixer until the mixture is smooth. Pour the mixture into a quart sized baggie (or piping bag) and refrigerate for an hour.
Take the filling filled bag out of the refrigerator and cut off the tip of one of the bottom corners. Pipe the filling into each tart shell – starting from the outside and making a spiral into the center. Refrigerate for at least one more hour (for filling to set completely).
Remove the tarts from the refrigerator and top them with the fresh fruit of your choice! (Strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, kiwi, mango, banana, raspberries, etc.)
For extra juicy fruit, slice the fruit of your choice into a container with a lid (“leftover dishes” as they are known in my house). Add a splash of lemon juice and a sprinkle of sugar. Refrigerate for a little while – 10 minutes to a few hours. Super yummy!
Enjoy!
These look so good! I’m so glad I got to taste the Frankensteined experiment.