I saw this post on Reddit last week, and decided that baking a bakewell tart sounded like an excellent idea. And so now I'm doing just that. Sometimes there's no more backstory to my bakes than that!
Bakewell Tart
Ingredients
For the pastry
- 140g Plain flour
- 7g (~1tbsp) Caster sugar
- 2g Salt
- 70g Butter
- ~2tbsp Cold water
For the filling
- 125g Caster sugar
- 125g Butter
- 1 Egg
- 30g Plain flour
- 125g Ground almonds
- 90g (~3tbsp) Black cherry jam*
- 25g Flaked almonds
Method
- Rub the flour, sugar, salt and butter for the pastry together until it resembles breadcrumbs.
- Add just enough water to form a dough.
- Roll out and line a greased pie dish**.
- Refrigerate for 30 minutes.
- Prick the base with a fork, fill with baking beans.
- Bake blind at 180C for ~15 minutes, remove the baking beans and bake for a further ~5 mins.
- Cream the butter and sugar for the filling together.
- Beat in the egg.
- Mix in the flour and ground almonds.
- Spread the jam generously over the base of the pie dish, then fill with almond mixture.
- Sprinkle the flaked almonds over the top.
- Bake at 160C for ~40mins, then increase temperature to 200C for ~5 minutes to brown.
- Leave to cool for 5 minutes before removing from the pie dish and leaving to cool fully.
*Yes, I know raspberry is probably most traditional, but (a) it's what I had in the fridge and (b) cherry jam is tastier than raspberry jam anyway.
**For reference, my pie dish is around 16cm diameter (quite small) - but could easily be anywhere between 15cm and 18cm depending on how you choose to measure it.
I can hardly believe it - for once, I actually got the quantities of both pastry and filling right! Here's the tart about to go into the oven.
Gosh it looks good fresh from the oven! It wobbles rather a lot more than I had expected though - I'm hoping that it sets properly when it cools. I'm a little concerned that there might not be enough egg and/or flour in the frangipane.
Edit: The verdict once it cooled was pretty similar to what I thought beforehand. The oversalted pastry was less noticeable, but the frangipane definitely seemed too buttery - perhaps a little less butter and maybe a little more flour would have helped. Fiona and I both agreed that it could have done with a bit more jam too. I think perhaps a slightly thicker pastry would have been nice as well, and would have helped offset the softness of the frangipane. But overall, it's pretty good!