2 ½ cups plain flour
¼ cup icing sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
125g butter cubed, cold
2 eggs
Method
Preheat oven to 180*C. Lightly grease your flan tin or pie dish.
Place flour, icing sugar (if using) and salt in the bowl of a food processor with the butter. Process until has a fine crumb consistency.
Add the eggs and process until the dough comes together in a soft ball. Flatten into a thick disc (or a rectangular shape if using a rectangular pan) and wrap with Glad wrap. Rest in the fridge for 10-15 minutes.
Place the pastry between two sheets of Glad wrap and roll out to the desired shape and to about 3mm thick.
Leave the pastry to rest again for about 15 minutes. The reason for this is, it will shrink a little bit – you don’t want it to shrink after you have lined your dish.
Using your rolling pin, loosely roll the pastry up and lift it over your tin. Drape it carefully over the tin, making sure it settles into the base well. You now have a choice whether to cut the excess pastry off, or to leave it draped over the edge and cut it off after it is cooked. The advantage of the second method is that the end result will not have shrunk at all.
Dock the pastry – prick it well with a fork over the base. This allows hot air to escape and avoids big bubbles in the floor of your pie.
Cut a circle of baking paper the same size as the base of the dish and place it on the pastry. Weigh the paper down with rice, dried peas or beans, or baking weights. (Rice or legumes can be put into a container and used over and over again as your blind baking weights.)
Bake for 15 minutes. Remove the weights and the paper and bake for a further 10 minutes or until light golden brown.
Cool before turning out of the flan tin or pie dish.
