Almond and brown butter tart with stewed rhubarb and crème fraiche

If someone ever asked me what the thing that I find the hardest when cooking is, my answer would without doubt be pastry. Specifically, shortcrust pastry. It always looks so effortless on the telly, when the beaming cook rolls out perfect, impossibly thin sheets, before casually lining their tin with the utmost precision. “Who needs to buy shortcrust pastry when it’s such a doddle?” they ask. They’ve clearly never experienced the crushing devastation of too-short pastry crumbling away at the merest suggestion of a rolling pin. The bottomless crevasses that appear from nowhere after blind baking. Or the brittle walls collapsing at the crucial moment of leaving the tin, spilling the filling to merge with the river of frustrated tears. Thankfully, practice (and a solid, reliable recipe) makes perfect, and after making pastry a few times recently, I decided it was time to cook something for this blog. 

 
However, I deserve absolutely no credit for the pastry itself. The recipe that I used is broadly based on Felicty Cloake’s version that she used to make her Perfect Custard Tart with. I always find her column brilliant when approaching new recipes or needing inspiration, and so far the pastry has worked every time. It’s even got to the point where I no longer dread getting the rolling pin out.
 
Adding brown butter to puddings and desserts seems to be very popular in London restaurants at the moment. But unlike a lot of trends and fads, it well and truly lives up to the hype. By cooking the butter until it is almost maple syrup in colour, a deep, rich and mellow flavour is released, which works as wonderfully with sweet things as it does with a piece of turbot. I will definitely be experimenting further with this, as I love the sound of other desserts to which it has been added; custard tarts, ice cream, icing etc.
 
Although making pastry was largely stress-free this time, there still managed to be a kitchen cock-up whilst testing this recipe. I wanted to make a crème fraiche ice cream to accompany the tart, but midway through churning, with a foul smell, the machine abruptly decided to overheat and refused to play anymore. So good old crème fraiche, straight out of the tub, came to the rescue. And after all of that faff, I’m not sure that the frozen version was even missed.
 
Serves 8-10
 
Ingredients:
 
For the pastry:
 
225g plain flour 
115g cold butter 
85g caster sugar 
3 egg yolks, plus 1 whole egg for brushing
 
For the filling:
 
300g unsalted butter 
300g caster sugar 
300g ground almonds 
3 medium eggs 
1 lemon, zest only
 
For the rhubarb:
 
4-5 sticks of rhubarb, trimmed and sliced into bite-sized pieces 
2 tbsp of caster sugar 
1 vanilla pod
 
To finish:
 
Crème fraiche


Start by making the pastry. Using your hands, rub the butter and flour together in a mixing bowl, until all of the butter has been incorporated and the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar, then the egg yolks. Work everything lightly until a dough is formed, then flatten slightly and wrap with cling film. Refrigerate for 1 hour 30 minutes to rest.
 
Use greaseproof paper to line the base and sides of a deep 9” tin with a loose base. Roll out the rested pastry on a lightly floured surface, then transfer to the tin. Patch any cracks, and use a spare piece of pastry to carefully edge the pastry into the corners. Leave the pastry overhanging the top of the tin. Wrap loosely with cling film and chill in the freezer for a further hour. 

 
Preheat the oven to 180⁰C (160⁰C Fan).
 
Prick the base of the tart with a fork, then cover with a sheet of greaseproof paper and fill with baking beans. Blind bake for 20 minutes, until golden brown around the sides. Remove the beans and paper, then return to the oven for a further 5 minutes. Crack the remaining egg into a bowl and beat with a fork. Brush the base and sides of the tart with some of the egg, then cook for a minute. Remove the shell from the oven and allow to cool slightly.
 
Lower the oven temperature to 150⁰C (130⁰C Fan). 

 
Measure out the sugar and the almonds and combine in a mixing bowl. Tip the butter for the filling into a saucepan and melt at a medium-high temperature. When the butter bubbles away and turns nut brown in colour, take it off the heat and pour into the almond mixture, stirring well with a wooden spoon. Beat in the eggs one at a time, until emulsified. Spoon the mixture into the pastry shell, it should leave a gap of about 1.5cm at the top. Gently slide the tart onto the middle shelf of the oven and bake for 1 hour 15 minutes, or until the filling has just set. Allow to cool slightly before carefully removing from the tin and slicing.
 
While the tart is cooking, add the rhubarb to a large frying pan along with the halved vanilla pod, the sugar and a splash of water. Bring up to a medium-low temperature, then cook for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the rhubarb has softened. Allow to cool.
 
Serve slices of the tart with some of the stewed rhubarb and juices. Finish with a generous dollop of crème fraiche.

Raspberry and lemon thyme macarons

I think that after the last few recipes that I have written for this blog, it’s about time that I did a bit of baking again. Although I have really focussed on savoury food recently, baking is how I got into cooking in the first place and still is a real passion of mine. I just love the happiness that a cake or other baked good creates in people. Even those like me without a real sweet tooth often can’t resist a slice!

I bit off a little more than I could chew with this recipe though. I had been wanting to have a go at making macarons for quite a while, but being relatively out of practice and slightly blase about how tricky they might be, I found them a real challenge. In hindsight this is really no surprise; the immaculate macarons that appear in patisseries are perfected and laboured over for years before getting right - what sort of chance was I going to have on my first go!? My first effort was far from perfect, with the finished macarons a little cracked on top instead of that lovely flat glossy look. But practice makes perfect, and I will definitely try again.

For the base of this recipe I turned to Felicity Cloake’s ever useful Guardian column. It was reassuring to find that she also had problems with her efforts, and I was intimidated by the amount of flack that she received from the macaron police in the comment section. But as a guide or introduction to a dish I find columns like hers very helpful, and from there you can change ingredients to suit what you are making. 

Her original recipe is posted on the Guardian website here: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2012/may/17/how-to-cook-perfect-chocolate-macarons

Instead of the chocolate flavouring used by Felicity, I went for something a little different. I love using raspberries in desserts, especially where anything meringue based is concerned. A meringue topped with whipped cream and stewed raspberries is often the perfect end to a summery meal. To incorporate them in this recipe I thought that dehydrating them in a low oven and them powdering them would work. This would intensify the flavour of the berry, and at the same time remove the chances of liquid getting into the macaron mixture and destabilising the finished result. Lemon thyme works really well with berries in sweet dishes, and I left the leaves whole so that the odd leaf could be seen on the surface (back off you macaron purists!)... 

Despite the imperfections they went down a storm and were quickly devoured. Surely that’s what baking is really all about.

Makes about 20

Ingredients:

125g raspberries 

2 tbsp lemon thyme, leaves picked and left whole

130g ground almonds

170g icing sugar

150g egg whites

120g caster sugar

Pinch of salt

For the filling:

150ml double cream

2 tbsp icing sugar

1 vanilla pod

125g raspberries

2 tbsp caster sugar

1 lemon, juice only

The night before baking, line a baking tray with greaseproof paper and scatter 125g of the raspberries on top. Put into a low oven heated to 60-70ºC and leave overnight. In the morning the raspberries should be completely dried out. Tip the raspberries into a small food processor or coffee grinder and blitz until you have a fine powder. Add the thyme leaves and set aside.

Line 2 baking trays with greaseproof parchment. Using a pencil, draw 3cm circles a couple of centimeters apart (I used the top of a squash bottle for this). This will really help with the piping later. Set aside until needed later.

Sieve the almonds, icing sugar and raspberry powder together into a bowl and set aside.

Weigh out the egg whites and pour into a large bowl. Using an electric whisk, mix the egg whites until they reach soft peaks then slowly add the caster sugar, a little at a time. Whisk on a high power until the meringue goes shiny and thick and forms stiff peaks. To test this, you should be able to tip the bowl upside-down without the contents tipping out. 

Fold in the icing sugar, almonds, lemon thyme and raspberry to the meringue, then mix well to knock out a little of the air. Spoon the mixture into a piping bag and carefully pipe inside the circle templates on the baking sheet. Try to keep the piped macarons as flat as possible, you don’t want little peaks rising from them. Once all the circles have been filled, drop the baking tray onto the surface from about 6” a couple of times, which will help knock the bubbles out. Leave to rest for between 45mins - 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 170ºC (Fan).

After the macarons have rested and formed a skin, carefully place in the oven for 17 minutes. Open the oven door a couple of times during this cooking time to help the steam escape. Once cooked, slide the macarons on the greaseproof paper onto a cooling rack and leave to cool completely. 

While the macarons are cooling make the filling. Put the remaining raspberries, the lemon juice and caster sugar into a small saucepan and cook on a medium-low heat for about 10 minutes, until the sugar has dissolved and a lot of the juices have escaped from the raspberries. Sieve the mixture into a bowl, pushing down on the raspberries with a spoon to get all of the liquid. 

Pour the liquid back into the saucepan and bubble away on a medium heat for a couple of minutes, until it thickens and forms a syrup. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

Scrape out the seeds from the vanilla pod and place in a medium bowl with the double cream and icing sugar. Whisk until soft peaks form, then fold in the cooled raspberry syrup.  Spoon into a piping bag.

Gently peel the cooled macaron halves from the baking sheet with a palette knife. Pipe a little of the filling mixture onto one half and sandwich carefully with the other. They will be quite crunchy if eaten straight away, but will become very soft, light and chewy if put in the fridge for a couple of hours. Devour at will.