The Great Milk Tart Incident

Once again, we set the bar high in terms of stellar weekends. Summer seems to have properly arrived, and with temperatures soaring into the mid twenties in the afternoons, it's the perfect time to slip into bikinis and tan in your local park. It's at times like this that I really do miss the beach, but the sight of an entire population shedding their clothing in the middle of a grassy patch in the city never fails to amuse me. Scarf and I spent a good 6 hours lying in the sun this weekend, and we both have a nice golden glow to show for it. We're now just holding thumbs that this is not a teaser like last year, where we had two weeks of great weather and that was it for the whole of "summer".

On Saturday we had our official housewarming combined with Shoes' birthday celebration. Everybody had already seen our place, and with the possible exception of two people, everybody has been drunk in it too, so this wasn't anything different. It was just bigger, better and messier! We got back from the park with a couple of hours to spare before guests started arriving, and Scarf used the time to make melktert (milk tart), a traditional South African dish of sugar-crust pastry filled with a custard-type mix. She makes each of us a cake on our birthdays, and we get to choose what type we want. Shoes decided on milk tart instead of a cake. My mother is Afrikaans, and was taught to cook and bake by my food-loving Afrikaans grandmother, so I turned to her for the ultimate milk tart recipe. This is one which has been in my family for years and is a closely guarded secret. If there is one thing that Afrikaners do exceptionally well, it is cook. Everything is heavy, creamy, deliciously flavourful and 100% full fat. You must know that dieting in a traditional Afrikaans family is like trying to stop McDonalds from taking over the world - absolutely impossible. It is very useful to have Afrikaans relatives when you want to whip up a fabulous dish to impress that special someone - not so much when you're trying to impress them with your bikini body after a winter spent siphoning thick, creamy soups and golden brown pies.

Anyway, my mother gladly passed on the recipe, and I e-mailed it to Scarf, not bothering to look at it first. If I had, or even if I'd just taken a moment to really think about my past experiences with my mother's recipes, I would have picked up on one small detail that could have headed off the Great Milk Tart Incident. Afrikaners do not know how to cook in small amounts. By tradition, they feel compelled to make enough food to feed a small army, no matter whether there are ten guests or two. This could be because they also by tradition have fairly large families, and everyone has very hearty appetites; the men especially can put food away on championship levels. Better too much than too little - leftovers can be turned into brand new creations that simultaneously amaze and stupify the eater.

As it turns out, this thought didn't cross my mind until Scarf was already halfway through mixing the filling, and I overheard her asking OJ if he could pop home and bring a bigger pot over as our ones weren't big enough to hold it all. A sense of foreboding swept over me as I realised what must have happened. I approached with caution.

"Scarf..... did you follow the recipe exactly as you see it? Or did you perhaps, um, increase it a little?"

"Oh ja, I doubled it."

"You what?"

"I doubled it. There are 15 of us, and one tart won't be enough....."

She broke off as she saw the expression on my face. I didn't even have to say it.

"Oh my gosh. It was already doubled, wasn't it? Oh my word. I thought it looked a bit excessive! How many tarts is this going to make?" Her voice had risen to a high pitched shriek.

I took a deep breath and plunged in. "If my mother has stayed true to her usual form, we're probably looking at about 8 milk tarts."

"8 MILK TARTS? BUT I ONLY BOUGHT TWO CRUSTS!!! WHERE ARE WE GOING TO PUT THEM??????????" Scarf's face had gone a brilliant shade of puce and a line of sweat beaded on her forehead.

"Ok, ok, don't panic, we'll think of something. I know, we'll just make the two proper tarts, and we'll put the rest into dishes and they can be crustless tarts. When everyone is drunk later they won't even notice."

And so, that is how we came to have enough milk tart for our entire block of flats. One of the genuine tarts got shared politely among the guests. One of the crustless ones got set upon much, much later that night, in what can only be described as a feeding frenzy. In a testament to how OTT things got, Shoes ploughed through the tray with a spoon, searching for the crust which he believed to be "somewhere under all that filling", and was flabbergasted the next day to find that there had never been a crust in the first place. The second genuine tart balanced precariously atop the salad stuff in the fridge, until someone pulled out an item acting as an anchor, and the next time OJ opened the fridge, the tart came catapulting out and landed face down on the floor. The second crustless tart is now a moosh of cinnamon and custard in a bowl in our fridge, and in our desperate attempt to get rid of it, everytime someone opens the fridge they have to have a spoonful.

Scarf is psychologically scarred and says she can never eat milk tart again. The rest of us still enjoy it, but are unable to eat even one more bite after a weekend of stuffing ourselves with it. On the plus side, the recipe is fantastic and when the milk tart moment peaked on Saturday night, everyone agreed it tasted great. Next time though, we might stick to chocolate cake.