Easy Cheese Puff Tarts

Cheese puff tarts are an entertainers delight. Buttery, flaky puff pastry,  filled with a delicious little hot cheese and caraway filling. Super quick to make and they can be frozen ready to bake whenever you want. Perfect finger food!

We love entertaining and cheese puff tarts are definitely one of our standby finger foods. A dear friend shared this recipe with us years ago, and a friend had given it to her. We like to share!

Super quick and easy to prepare

Cheese puff tarts are super easy to prepare. Simply grate your cheese and add everything else to the processor. Blitz and you are ready to pop into the puff pastry and bake. Too easy!

Pastry

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Look for butter puff pastry, as opposed to pastry made with margarine, as butter always delivers a better flavour. The sheets we use are frozen, square, and ready rolled. Frozen ready rolled pastry thaws in minutes, so all you need to do is use a cookie cutter to cut out the pastry discs. We like!

You can see why they’re called ‘cheese puff tarts’

Don’t be tempted to overfill the pastry cases as these little tarts really do puff up a lot.

Freeze like a dream

Cheese puff tarts freeze like a dream. Place uncooked tarts in the tray into the  freezer. Freeze, then remove the tarts from the tray and place in zip lock bags. When you’re ready to cook simply place them into greased trays again and bake straight from the freezer, but give them an additional 5 minutes from frozen to cook. Easy peasy.

The mixture can be frozen as is, ready to take from the freezer, thaw and fill your pastry cases.

Freeze tarts at this point then remove from tray and bag them. Replace into tray when ready to bake

Cheese

Cheddar cheese can be mild, tasty or sharp in taste. Look for an aged sharp cheddar to give you the best flavour.

You can substitute the cheddar for other cheeses. Swiss, Gouda, Edam, Colby or Emmental would make good alternatives to using cheddar cheese.

Try adding some blue cheese with the cheddar such as Danish blue, Gorgonzola, Roquefort, Maytag or Stilton would all add incredible flavour to these little cheese puff tarts.

Caraway seeds

Using caraway seeds in the puffs is completely optional but they do add a distinctive, but mild anise flavour to the cheese.

Use a dry frypan over medium heat and add the caraway seeds to the pan. Shake the pan for 2-3 minutes until you can smell the fragrant, toasted aroma.

Add other flavours

We often add some finely chopped, and sautéed bacon and onion to the mixture to add additional flavour to the cheese puff tarts. Or try adding some finely chopped semi dried tomatoes. Chives add a lovely complimentary flavour to the cheese, as would finely sliced shallots (scallions).

Watch how to make Easy Cheese Puff Tarts

What’s your favourite finger foods to serve at parties?

Don’t forget to rate this recipe and let us know what you thought when you make these fabulous Cheese Puff Tarts in the reviews below.