jamie oliver's bakewell tart

After seeing Jamie Oliver live, I've been on a bit of a Jamie rampage. The boy has been religiously watching Jamie's Revolution on Youtube and well, the cookbooks I own have been pulled out from their respective spots in my room and recipes are being bookmarked for making. Here's the first of the recipes from Jamie's dinners (probably one of my most used Jamie Oliver books - I look through this book and every recipe is something that I want to eat!) The recipe is for Jamie Oliver's Bakewell Tart; I've tweaked the recipe a little bit so hopefully you find this a bit easier than the one in the book.

Introducing the new family member to my kitchen! It sat in its box for a couple of weeks so I was glad to finally pull it out to use. Anyway, here I've used it to make the pastry for the Bakewell tart. Cream together 125g butter, 100g icing sugar, a small pinch of salt in the food processor. 

Add to it 255g flour, vanilla seeds from 1 vanilla pod, zest of 1/2 lemon and 2 egg yolks. Pulse together until the mixture looks like coarse breadcrumbs, then add 2 tbsp cold milk. Open the lid of the processor and using a spatula, work the mixture into a ball of dough. Take the dough out of the food processor and place on a lightly floured surface. Work the pastry together but not too much otherwise you'll risk it becoming elasticy and chewy rather than flaky and short as it should be. Wrap the dough in cling film and place in the fridge for at least an hour.

Whilst I had the pastry in the fridge, I went about to make the frangipane (which is the filling for a bakewell tart). First of all, wash out the food processor bowl. In the clean bowl, combine 300g butter and 300g caster sugar until light and creamy. Add to it 350g almond meal and 3 lightly beaten eggs. Fold the mix together until completely mixed and smooth. Place it in the fridge to firm up slightly. Time to do a bit of cleaning up!

 By the time you've cleaned up, you'll be able to take the pastry out of the fridge. Roll out the pastry and line a 28cm loose-bottomed tart tin with it. For me, I had enough to make a big tart and a mini one. Place these in the fridge for around an hour (I cheated here a bit and you can see the shrinkage in my big tart in one of the pics below.) Half an hour before the the tins are ready, preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Once the hour of fridging the tin and pastry is up, bake tarts for around 15 minutes or until lightly golden.

Remove from the oven, place to one side, and turn the oven heat down to 170 degrees.

Smear about 6 tbsps jam over the bottom of the pastry case.

Pour in the chilled frangipane mixture on top and sprinkle with some sliced blanched almonds.

Bake the tart for 40 minutes, or until the almond mixture has become firm and golden on the outside but is still soft in the middle.

Allow to cool for about 30 minutes and serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream! (the recipe also recommends creme fraiche or custard) Here I've cut up the small tart; it was already quite filling to have a small slice of it!

My thoughts? This tart was a lot of work and also a lot of tart! Probably took me a good 4 hours from start to finish and at the end of it, there was just so much tart to eat. My aunt kindly dropped by to take away half of it but even with the half we had at home, we've eaten it ever so slowly. In hindsight, I should've looked at the ingredient list properly and realised that there was over a kilo of ingredients in it and culled it to half to make it slightly more manageable. 

Whilst making it, both the boy and mum expressed concern over the amount of sugar and they were right, it did end up being quite a sweet tart (but still a yummy one!) I highly recommend serving this tart warm with vanilla ice cream, it's the perfect combo. If anything, the food processor came in real handy for this recipe and it did make me think, why on earth didn't I get one earlier? It's so easy to use and my pastry came out so smooth and flaky, I can't imagine why I would ever to do it again my hand! Anyway, more Jamie adventures to follow and yes, I'm also quite addicted to my food processor so I'm sure you'll see more of it soon. Watch this space!