DARING BAKERS do BAKEWELL TARTS…& I do a few HEARTS too!!

Inspirations and References: Allan Davidson, Tamasin Day Lewis, Anton Edelmann, Jane Grigson, Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver

Mandatory element 2: Frangipane – it’s rich, sweet and slightly luxurious.
Optional element: Home made jam or curd

The challenge providing an optional opportunity to make jam, something I love to do.

The timing just right for jam as stone fruit flood our market, & I bottled up some peachy memories in a jar. You can view my ‘Peach-Rosemary Jam’ recipe here. I posted it a short while ago.

I adapted the shortcrust recipe a bit as am vary of egg in pastry. It’s more of a psychological thing, & I cannot enjoy it if I knead egg into it. Nevertheless, with the family in mind, I amended the recipe slightly. The resultant pastry was still beautiful, light & crisp. The only little hassle I had was that it remained soft, actually far too soft to roll after a couple of hours in the fridge as our weather is HOT (42-44C) & not pastry rolling/making weather. I rested it in the fridge overnight & got up early the next morning & rolled it out. It still broke up a few times, but patchwork in this recipe works magic, & I got a decent base. We had it at room temperature the first day. Seconds were delicious served cold the next day, & the base remained crisp in the fridge. I think the frozen butter & quick, minimal handling of dough is key here. It’s a beautiful recipe, a keeper! Sweet shortcrust pastry
Ingredients:

• Sift together flour, sugar and salt. Grate butter into the flour mixture, using the large hole-side of a box grater. Using your finger tips only, and working very quickly, rub the fat into the flour until the mixture resembles bread crumbs. Set aside.
• Lightly beat the egg yolk with the almond & vanilla extract and quickly mix into the flour mixture. Keep mixing while dribbling in the water, only adding enough to form a cohesive and slightly sticky dough.
• Form the dough into a disc, wrap in cling and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes . I rested it overnight.

Frangipane
adapted from Aran @ Canelle et Vanille
Ingredients:
100gms unsalted butter, softened
100 powdered vanilla sugar
1 egg
1tsp almond extract
1tsp vanilla extract
100g ground almonds
30g all purpose flour

Method:

• Cream butter and sugar together for about a minute or until the mixture is primrose in colour and very fluffy. Scrape down the side of the bowl and add the egg and beat well one The batter may appear to curdle. In the words of Douglas Adams: Don’t panic. Really. It’ll be fine. Pour in the almond extract and mix for about another 30 seconds and scrape down the sides again. With the beaters on, spoon in the ground nuts and the flour. Mix well. The mixture will be soft, keep its slightly curdled look (mostly from the almonds) and retain its pallid yellow colour. Use immediately or refridgerate for a day in a ziploc/baggie.
• My Peach-Rosemary Jam recipe can be found here, as adapted from Martha Stewart.

Assembling the tart

• Place the chilled dough disc on a lightly floured surface. If it’s overly cold, you will need to let it become acclimatised for about 15 minutes before you roll it out. Flour the rolling pin and roll the pastry to 5mm (1/4”) thickness, by rolling in one direction only (start from the centre and roll away from you), and turning the disc a quarter turn after each roll. When the pastry is to the desired size and thickness, transfer it to the tart pan, press in and trim the excess dough. Patch any holes, fissures or tears with trimmed bits. Chill in the freezer for 15 minutes.
• Preheat oven to 200C/400F.
• Remove shell from freezer, spread as even a layer as you can of jam onto the pastry base. Top with frangipane, spreading to cover the entire surface of the tart. Smooth the top and pop into the oven for 30 minutes. Five minutes before the tart is done, the top will be poofy and brownish. Remove from oven and strew flaked almonds on top and return to the heat for the last five minutes of baking.

The finished tart will have a golden crust and the frangipane will be tanned, poofy and a bit spongy-looking. Remove from the oven and cool on the counter. Serve warm, with crème fraîche, whipped cream or custard sauce if you wish. When you slice into the tart, the almond paste will be firm, but slightly squidgy and the crust should be crisp but not tough. The origins of the tart are not clear, however the generally accepted story is that it was first made by accident in 1820 when the landlady of the White Horse Inn left instructions for her cook to make a jam tart. The cook, instead of stirring the eggs and almond paste mixture into the pastry, spread it on top of the jam. When cooked the jam rose through the paste. The result was successful enough for it to become a popular dish at the inn, and commercial variations, usually with icing sugar on top, have spread the name. The name is believed to have come from a customer who decided that the tart was “baked well” thus the inn called it their “Bakewell” tart, a pun on the town of Bakewell and a well baked tart.

The tart tasted spectacular. An easy & delicious challenge for the month, with room for creativity in the filling once again. I was thrilled to see it because I have been enamoured with the name frangipane for ages. A romantic sounding name, I often wondered how it tasted. Have seen it used beautifully by Aran @ Canelle et Vanille, & that recipe stuck in my head. The moment I read the challenge, I was off to compare recipes. Aran’s recipe appealed to me primarily because it used fewer eggs, & marginally less butter. The portion was enough for 1 rectangular tart, though I had some pastry dough left sans filling.I could have left the pastry a few mms thicker to use all the dough. Made a few rustic heart shaped tart cases with the left over dough. I filled those with some left over Bavarian cream from my peach monster’s 10th birthday cake. I used the recipe for the Bavarian cream from Helen‘s post @ Tartlette here. These little hearts were divine too.

Thank you for another great challenge ladies – Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict & Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. I love being a Daring Baker, & the family loves being a Daring Baker family, because now they’re also interested in what the next challenge is going to be. The good thing is the pin-drop silence & tip-toeing around when they know it’s the baker being daring in the kitchen!! LOL!

To see how well the other bakers have done on the tart, do stop by at our blogroll here.