Friday Pie Day: Cheesy Spring Onion Tart...and a Revelation

You may remember a while back that I had a slightly volatile 'incident' with a cheese tart. (Well, 12 of them.) I fully blame my non-co-operative fan oven for that.
Over the last week or so though, I've discovered something that I think may be the answer to all my recent baking failures.

So, you know when you have a problem and the solution is often right there infront of you? Well yes, this was one of those times.

Now, I've been 'making do' over the last couple months with the old oven that came with my new house. Let me point out to you the confusion this has caused me, from the fact that it has many a knob:

The oven itself has two parts: the main fan (convection) oven at the bottom, and then a 'top' oven, on the er, top.

I've just been using the fan oven, which has caused me much grief in refusing to cook things evenly, burning things on top (or on one side) and just generally being stubborn and unhelpful.

This 'top' oven though. Excusing the fact that it's labelled as an oven, I just assumed that this was a grill only, and that it was a ye olde name for it. In any case, I hadn't used it.

Then, I was looking at the knobs properly the other day (as you do) and noticed that the unlabelled knob next to the top oven one has a squiggly line on it - yes, denoting a grill.

Like a tubelight, the realisation was slowly flickering into place in my mind. The top oven has oven temperature numbers on it, whereas the other knob has numbers 1-5 on it. Up until now, I thought it was something extra to do with the electric hobs (despite there already being a knob for each of the 4 hobs).

But no, they are of course, the grill settings.

Ohhh.

I immediately decided to try and bake a pie in this top oven. A version of the volatile cheese tarts - in big tart form. A little risky, yes. But it worked perfectly. Obviously, the top oven is smaller than the main fan oven and so I won't be roasting any chickens in there at any point. But I think it's safe to say that I'll mainly be using this one from now on.

Gah, I'm so slow sometimes!

Cheesy Spring Onion Tart (v)

Print-friendly recipe

For an 8” pie dish:
150g plain flour
Pinch of salt
75g unsalted butter, cold, diced
Some ice cold water
OR 250g shortcrust pastry

75g grated cheddar cheese
1 egg, beaten
125ml double cream
4 spring onions, chopped
1 tbsp oregano

If using premade pastry, go straight to step 3.

1. Sift the flour into a large bowl with the salt. Rub in the diced butter to a breadcrumb mixture.
2. Adding in a little water at a time, start to bring the mixture together to fold into a dough. Wrap and chill for 30 minutes.
3. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees C. Roll out the dough into a circle on a floured surface. Transfer to line a 8” pie tin. Cover with foil and fill with baking beads. Bake for 12-15 minutes until lightly golden. Allow to cool.
4. Put the oven back onto 190 degrees C. Mix the cheese with the beaten egg, followed by the cream. Carefully fold in the spring onions.
5. Scatter the oregano over the base of your cooked pastry case. Pour in the cheesy spring onion mixture, then bake for about 30 minutes, until set – it should spring back a little when you gently press with your finger!

Pie out.

Read my other Friday Pie Day adventures.