Earl grey tea milk tart {London fog} recipe (2024)

I had every intention of making a classic South African milk tart recipe because I hadn’t done one before and it was high time. I have a small group of ex-pats readers scattered aroundthe world who regularly write to me expressing gratitude over my home-grown recipes. Especially my grandmother’s crunchies, which are somewhat legendary. So this is for you. I decided to urn it into an early grey tea milk tart for fun.

I had also saved a recipe from a magazine years ago and stored it in my ‘recipes-to-make’ file, which as it turns out is more of a recipe-file-thirteenand thismakes me very sad. I mean there are just too many recipes to make in this life and I can sometimes feel like a failure.

This milk tart recipe, however, wasnot going to become one of those.

It comes via Sam Woulidge’s Taste column and I had torn it out of the magazine years ago. The recipe is from Bianca du Plessis’s KitchenVixen blogand is a recipefor anyone who needs an Ouma’s (grandmother’s) milk tart recipe that doesn’t have one. Sam and Bianca are two of my favourite South African food writers with an incredible depth of knowledge who write beautifully from the heart.

I’ve also been doing extensive but passive research over the last while, asking many of my Afrikaans-speaking friends what the base of a traditional milk tart should be, and there was no definitive answer. You get a puff pastry base, a shortcrust base and a tennis biscuit base and I wanted to know what themost authentic was.

After further book and Internet research, I started to see that puff pastry was probably the most common base used but I also knew that it was never going to be my base of choice. With all due respect to the milk tart recipe makers out there, puff pastry is just a bad idea. The bottom is always soggy because it never sees the light of day and gets a chance to crisp up thereby destroying all the best parts about it. You might get a nice flaky crust around the tart, but that just isn’t good enough.

The second option of a shortcrust pastry is great in that you blind-bake it to crisp up the texture, but let’s face it, pastry tart making is a choreof noteand one I find far too laborious.

The biscuit base is the best in my opinion because it’s simply a case of grinding a packet of tennis biscuits in the food processor and pouring melted butter in. No pre-baking or any other prep is required. The base has a stunning golden and crunchy texture with amazing flavour. It also turns out to be the base of choice for Bianca’s Ouma’s recipe so I was feeling right on track.

Now there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with a classic milk tart and in fact, it’s one of my favourite South African dishes, but I felt compelled to add an early grey tea infusion because I had another bee in my bonnet.

London Fog recipes have been popping into my Pinterest feed a lot lately and that normally indicates it’s some kind of trend. As a tea geek, it’s also something that appeals to me immensely. Maybe social media algorithms have forced this on me, but I’ve become rather fascinated by this flavour which is essentially milky earl grey tea with vanilla. Kind of like an early grey tea latte but with vanilla and it seems weird to have been invented in Canada and not the UK.

I’ve seen London fog cakes, milkshakes and ice creams so it just made perfect sense to turn a milk tart – which consists predominantly of milk into a London fog rendition.

It was delicious.

The tea infuses best in water because the fat in milk inhibits this process, but since there is no water in a milk tart recipe I decided to add a hefty dose of loose-leaf Earl Grey (I used Twining’s) into the milk to ensure an adequate flavour infusion.

I also upped the vanilla a bit and along with the 2 vanilla pods in the recipe, added a teaspoon of vanilla extract.

I baked the milk tart in a springform cake tin because I wanted to remove the whole thing for the shoot, but ideally, a milk tart would be baked in a wider pie dish and then slices cut out.

I also baked this in a smaller 23cm cake tin (it’s all I had) so this threw the cooking time out and I needed to bake it for 20 minutes longer. If you are using a wider dish, the original cooking time of 20 minutes will probably be fine. The tart is very wobbly when it comes out of the oven but sets when it cools.

*cooks notes ~ the temperature is unusually high so I needed to cover the tart with foil from about 10 minutes in to prevent over-browning. I also added a light sprinkle of cinnamon to the top but this is entirely optional. The magazine copy I worked off had omitted the sugar from the biscuit base which I noticed afterwards was included in the original recipe. I think this is preferable, as additional sugar would have made it too sweet.

If you are living outside South Africa and can’t get hold of tennis biscuits, simply replace them with digestives or Graham crackers. Tennis biscuits are coconut-flavoured tea biscuits.

To keep this recipe 100% traditional simply omit the earl grey tea infusion phase

Oh and for the benefit of any international reader who is not familiar with a South African milk tart or ‘melktert’, it’s essentially a baked custard and can be likenedto the Portuguese pasteis de nata. It originates from the Dutch settlers who colonised the Cape in the 1600’s. Jamie Oliver made it a little famous when he added a crunchy caramel layer to it which I find delectable. It’s already so much like crème brûlée that this makes total sense to me. You get baked and unbaked versions and even ones without the crust.

You might also like these other South African recipes:

Classic South African unbaked milk tarts

Classic South African koeksisters

Orange malva pudding

My grandmother Betty’s crunchy recipe

A classic buttermilk rusk recipe

Easy peppermint crisp pudding

Traditional South African bobotie with fragrant yellow rice

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