Today we are having a barbeque at work, and the Gods must be happy with us as it is a beautiful September day, the temperature is supposed to reach 25°C, which, depressing though it is to admit, is a lot hotter than most of August! I particularly like the barbeques we have at work because a) we get to eat lots of scrummy barbequed food, and b) we get to skive off work for about three hours while we eat it!
My role in work barbeques, funnily enough, is to bring the pudding. I find it useful in my baking escapades because it gives me a more discerning forum in which to unleash my baked goods. Whilst I don’t really mind the outcome of goodies baked for friends and family, for my work colleagues, I normally feel a great desire to impress.
My work barbeque repertoire so far has included a lemon and lime fridge cake, coconut and white chocolate cookies, a peach and raspberry crumble, particularly gooey chocolate brownies, a Scandinavian apple cake, a blueberry marbled butter cake and a peach and raspberry traybake. This time, I have gone for the time-old favourite; jam tart yumminess.
The scariest part of the recipe was the pastry, which, after close observation of the almighty failures of the contestants on The Great British Bake Off, I was significantly nervous about making. I used a recipe from, in my humble opinion the Queen of Domestication, good old Delia, which was surprisingly and gratifyingly easy, leaving me thinking that I should probably enter the next series of The Great British Bake Off as evidently, I would quite easily stave off the competition!
After my success in making the pastry, I was faced with the troubling dilemma of whether to make one big traditional tart or individual tartlets. Both have their benefits, depending on how you like your jam to pastry ratio. Ultimately I decided that, as it was a pudding I was providing as opposed to afternoon tea, I would make one large tart and serve it with custard.
I used shortcrust pastry for the tart, opposing some recipes that suggest a sweet shortcrust, but I thought that might turn out to all be a bit too sweet. The result was very pleasing with a sweet jam filling and crisp savoury pastry. It got the thumbs up from one colleague in particular who is a self-confessed jam tart connoisseur.
For the shortcrust pastry:
For the Filling:
- Good quality jam (or homemade if you're a bit of a Kirsty Allsopp)
The key to good pastry, as told to me by both Delia and my mother, so must be true, is to keep everything as cold as possible; cold bowl, cold water, cold hands. Also try to handle the dough as little as possible as this also heats up the mixture, and for some scientific baking reason, which I won’t go into now, will result in some sort of pastry disaster.
Sieve the flour and salt into a bowl then add the butter and margarine/lard. Very gently rub the mixture together between your fingers, as high as possible above the bowl to give it lots of air, until it resembles even bread crumbs. Sprinkle two tablespoons of cold water over the mixture, then, using a round tipped knife, fold the mixture until it starts to clump together, adding more water, a tiny bit at a time, if needed. Once the dough is almost formed, take it out of the bowl and roll it into a ball with your hands. Wrap it in cling film and leave in a cool dry place (a fridge possibly?) for at least twenty minutes to set. It can be kept for a few days and also frozen, to then be thawed out when needed.
Roll out the pastry between two sheets of cling film (to avoid extra flour usage) so that it fits a 20cm flan tin. Lift the pastry onto the tin using one of the sheets of cling film to help. Gently press the pastry into the tin, then using a knife cut away the excess from the edges. Prick the base of the pastry with a fork to avoid air bubbles forming during the cooking process. Fill the tart with the jam of your choice (I used strawberry) and then if you’re feeling super domesticated, roll out long thin sausages from the excess pastry and create an attractive lattice work across the jam. I didn’t have enough pastry left over to do this and it all but broke my heart.
Cook the tart in a pre-heated oven at 180°C for about 20 minutes or until the edges of the pastry turn golden brown. If you cut it into 12 servings, each slice will have roughly 200 calories.
Another top pastry tip from Mummy Cookie is put a baking sheet in the oven while it is heating, and place the tart on it to cook. This gives a nice crisp base to the tart. There’s no soggy pastry in the Cookie household, that’s for sure!
