Guess what. It’s already Wednesday again. Brilliant.

My cupboards are impressively bare at the mo. I haven’t even conditioned my hair in about two weeks. Shock horror, I know. For some curious reason, however, my fridge is groaning under the weight of butter. One recipe guaranteed to soak up the butter – bakewell.

I’m fairly sure everyone loves bakewell. It is astonishingly unhealthy but seems so innocent. Well played bakewell. Unfortunately I had none of mum’s delicious, homemade raspberry jam left. I did however have surplus apricot jam from a recent glazing event. Conveniently, almonds and apricots are lovely together.

One hiccup with this recipe is the need for pastry though. Usually this might not be an issue but someone left the heating on and forgot to open the windows in Dublin. It’s such heavy weather. My pastry for one does not appreciate such conditions but with a little refrigeration you’re away on a hack.

I also only had a bit of rice flour left so I made a little, round tart (8inch) but I prefer right angled bakewell for the record.

Let us begin.

Oven temperature 180 Celsius

Pastry:

Plain flour                    230g

Butter                            140g

Caster sugar                 25g

Pinch o’ salt

Egg yolk                        1

Water                            2 tablespoons

Bakewell;

Butter (melted)           185g

Rice flour                      140g

Ground almonds         100g

Caster sugar. 100g

Eggs                                2

Almond essence           1 teaspoon

Jam                                3 tablespoons

Preheat the oven. Grease the tin with butter and flour. Make the pastry, let me direct you to a previous post that has a step by step guide, and place it in the tin. The wonderfullness of this recipe is that you don’t need to bake the pastry blind.

Now, to the almondy batter. Put the rice flour, ground almonds, eggs and almond essence into a mixing bowl and beat to combine. Pour in the butter and continue to mix till all lovely and smooth.

Spoon your chosen jam into the unbaked pastry case and smooth it down to cover the entire base.

Pour in the almondy batter on top of the jam. If the batter is a little thick spoon it in, starting at the outside edge and working inwards to avoid jam swirls. Now, some odd folks like flaked almonds but I don’t. Funny texture. If you are one of these odd folk let your artistic side out and decorate the top of the tart with the unpleasant flaked almonds.

That wasn’t too taxing. Place it in the oven and bake for 40mins. I turned mine half way through to make sure it browned evenly.

Let it cool down almost entirely before eating with a cup of tea, whilst sitting in an iced bath.