Mary Berry’s Bakewell Tart
For our first baking experience of the year, we decided we wanted to try a bakewell tart. Now, we had never heard of a bakewell tart or eaten one, of course, until we watched The Great British Baking Show. Apparently, this type of tart is about as common in England as an apple pie is here in the USA (my assumption of course). What is a Bakewell Tart you ask? A bakewell tart is an English confection consisting of a shortcrust pastry shell beneath layers of jam, frangipane, and a topping of flaked almonds. Which leads to the next question; what is frangipane? Frangipane is an almond filling that is a mixture of butter, eggs, ground almonds, sugar, and usually a small amount of flour.
We did a little (turns out, very little) research on the tart because we really wanted to make the tart we had seen on the TV show. We went to the BBC website and printed off the recipe. Here is the recipe that we used.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/bakewell_tart_90600
Ingredients
For the jam
- 200g/7oz raspberries
- 250g/9oz jam sugar
For the sweet shortcrust pastry
- 225g/8oz plain flour, plus extra for dusting
- 150g/5½oz butter, chilled
- 25g/1oz icing sugar
- 1 large free-range egg, beaten
For the filling
- 150g/5½oz butter, softened
- 150g/5½oz caster sugar
- 150g/5½oz ground almonds
- 1 large free-range egg, beaten
- 1 tsp almond extract
For the icing
- 300g/10½oz icing sugar
- 1 tsp almond extract
- pink food colouring gel
Method
- For the jam, put the raspberries in a small, deep-sided saucepan and crush them using a masher. Add the sugar and bring to the boil over a low heat until the sugar has melted. Increase the heat and boil for 4 minutes. Remove from the heat and carefully pour into a shallow container. Leave to cool and set.
- For the pastry, measure the flour into a bowl and rub in the butter using your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the icing sugar. Add the egg and 2 tablespoons cold water, mixing to form soft dough.
- Roll out the dough on a lightly floured work surface to the thickness of a pound coin. Line a 23cm/9in fluted flan tin and transfer to the fridge to chill for 30 minutes.
- Preheat the oven to 200C/180C Fan/Gas 6.
- Line the pastry case with non-stick baking paper and fill with baking beans or uncooked rice. Bake blind for 15 minutes, then remove the beans and paper and cook for a further 5 minutes to dry out the base. Set aside to cool a little before adding the filling.
- For the filling, spread the base of the pastry case with 4 tablespoons of raspberry jam.
- Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add the ground almonds, egg and almond extract and mix together. Spoon the mixture into the pastry case and smooth the surface using a palette knife.
- Reduce the oven temperature to 180C/160C Fan/Gas 4 and bake for 25–35 minutes, until golden-brown and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool completely in the tin.
- For the icing, sift the icing sugar into a bowl. Stir in the almond extract and about 3 tablespoons cold water to make a smooth, fairly thick icing. Place 3 tablespoons of the icing in a separate bowl and add a little pink food colouring gel to make a raspberry coloured icing. Spoon the pink icing into a small piping bag fitted with a small plain nozzle.
- When the tart has cooled completely, spoon the white icing on top and spread to form a smooth surface. Pipe parallel lines of pink icing over the white icing, then drag a cocktail stick through the lines (at a 90 degree angle to the lines) to create a feathered effect. Leave to set, then serve in slices.
Our Experience
We learned pretty quickly that using a British recipe was a little more work than an “American” one. The weights weren’t the problem since we have a food scale. But, knowing the exact ingredients was not as easy as we expected because they call things by different names and we had to look up several of them. We also had to figure out the Celsius conversion to Farenheit. Our other difficulty arose as we made it. Since we do a fair amount of baking, we can usually look at a recipe and make alterations based upon our personal tastes. For instance, in this recipe, I thought that 150g of sugar for 7 oz of raspberries would be far too sweet for our tastes. We reduced it to 50g and it was deliciously sweet/tart…just like we wanted. (I licked the strainer off it was so good.) But, the frangipane was a different story. We have never made one, seen one, or eaten one. We were at the mercy of the recipe. We also decided that the glaze would also be awfully sweet, that thick layer of white in Mary’s tart is pure sugar…eek! While we really wanted to do the feathering, neither of us thought it was worth keeping that sweetness overload just for looks.
A couple other notes, we used whole wheat pastry flour instead of “plain flour” and a mixture of erythritol and xylitol for the sugars. We added pectin (for low/no sugar jams) and citric acid to create our own “jam sugar”.
Other than the change of ingredients, we followed the recipe as written for the jam. After seeing the finished product, we decided the seeds needed strained out if we expected our finicky taste testers to eat it.
The shortcrust was the most familiar item on the list. We grated frozen butter and then used a pastry cutter to break it down even more. (It’s been awhile since I used THAT! My KitchenAid mixer is my usual go to for cutting butter into flour.) We probably could have spent a little more time on it, but, we really wanted to get it in the refrigerator to cool. Once it had chilled, we blind baked it as directed. Even after half an hour of chilling, it shrank more than I had expected. Mid bake, it’s nice to get to sample some of the parts. In this case, the scraps were baked and tasted…and we were not disappointed. (Just a note: don’t forget the tart pan has a removable bottom. It’s amazing how well a perfectly shaped and molded crust can pop out as you are carrying it to the refrigerator. Sigh.)
As we were making the frangipane, we thought there was a lot of butter but assumed the recipe was correct. Since the recipe called for ground almonds, we bought slivered almonds and used the food processor to grind them. We left them a bit chunky, because, again, we didn’t have any frame of reference. For this part of the recipe, we didn’t make any changes due to our inexperience.
While assembling the tart, 4T jam seemed pretty skimpy. We decided not to measure it and just use everything that we had. Since we had removed the seeds, there was less of it than the recipe would have made. The frangipane spread really well and, as far as we knew, it was exactly the way it was supposed to be. After baking it for 35 minutes, it was evident that something wasn’t quite right. The center was really wobbly and reallllly greasy…..like, oozing butter. I tried to soak up some of the butter with paper towels. I stopped after replacing the soaked ones about 10 times.
Once it was cooled, we decided to put a very thin layer of glaze on it and tried our best to make it somewhat decorative since we chose to lose the feathering. It was a decent compromise, in our opinion.
What we liked.
The tart was pretty tasty, as far as Aubrey and I were concerned. I thought that it tasted better the next day once the flavors had some time to mellow (if that’s the right word). The extra butter actually made the shortcrust a little more like shortbread, which we both like. The jam was pure raspberry deliciousness. I don’t know why I have never made it before! I think if I mixed it with some no sugar added applesauce, it would make some amazing fruit roll-ups! We didn’t notice any problems using the whole wheat flour or sugar substitutes and they didn’t affect the flavors, albeit we are used to sugar substitutes.
What we would change.
After looking at a few more recipes for Bakewell tarts, we decided that this recipe “might” have been posted incorrectly. Most of the recipes we saw had 1/3 the amount of butter that this one did and many had several more eggs and some even had flour. When we looked at American recipes, we also noted that they called for almond flour instead of “ground almonds” which we thought might have been the language difference again. While we liked the crunchy texture of the ground almonds in the tart, we realized that it would have been better with the use of almond flour. It would have been lighter too. Some other ideas that we had were to change the almond extract to vanilla (since we liked the idea of vanilla and raspberries better) or to change the raspberries to cherries (we like cherry with almond better). Finally, we would take a cue from some of the other recipes we saw with sliced almonds and drizzled glaze for the topping.
What we learned.
The tart pleased 3 out of 5 in our family even with the issues we experienced and we will certainly try another one with a few modifications. I think our biggest takeaway from this bake was that we need to research and compare a few recipes before we settle on the one we plan to try. Aubrey suggested we use recipes out of cookbooks since they are tested and proofread before printed. I think she’s got something there!
Until next week, Happy Baking!