Pasteis de Natas

We discovered these small pastries at a nearby Portuguese cafe.  They are crisp puff pastry shells filled with egg custard and are delicious, particularly with a cup of coffee or tea.  All the cafe's bread and pastries are made on the premises and the owner/baker was kind enough to tell me how he made them.

After several experiments I still wasn't able to reproduce anything as good as our cafe.  The problem was the filling, it was neither a pastry cream nor an egg custard, but something in between.  As a last resort  I searched for a recipe on the internet and eventually found one that seemed to follow the instructions I'd had from my friendly baker.

The results were very good.  The recipe can be found at Pasteis de Nata.  I used good quality (all butter), shop bought, puff pastry instead of that given in the recipe and I found that cutting the sugar to 120g got approval from my team of tasters.

These cook very quickly (8-12 minutes) and are simple to make, using bought pastry.  The filling can be made well in advance and kept in the fridge for a day or two.