Winter Pavlova with Pears, Mascarpone & Caramel Sauce

A luscious confection of vanilla-scented poached pears, a brittle meringue case, flurries of cream and a scandalously rich caramel sauce. This isn't a dessert you can rustle up in an instant - it takes time and effort to prepare - but I hope you will give it a bash, because I reckon you (and your guests) will be delighted by the result.

Winter Pavlova with Pears, Mascarpone & Caramel Sauce.

Classic Pavlovas have a slightly squidgy centre, but this is a rather dryer version, because I'm a fan of crackly meringue that's as white as snow and crumbles to a sweet dust in your mouth. Admittedly, this isn't easy to achieve when you're baking such a large volume of whipped egg white, because much depends on your oven, the freshness of your eggs, the humidity in your kitchen, and the other vagaries of the sugar/egg relationship.

I'm not a natural when it comes to any type of meringue - damn, it's tricky to make - but after much experimentation I've found that a slow drying-out process is the way to go.

What makes this dish special is the lovely taste of home-poached pears.

You can use any variety of pears for this recipe, provided they are small, sweet and just ripe. Yes, I know this is a tall order, because most pears are perfect for 20 minutes before they collapse into a floury mush.  But there are ways around this - please see my Cook's Notes at the end of this page.

If you're in a hurry, feel no shame in using excellent South African tinned pears. Your finished Pavlova won't look as glamorous, sure, but it will still taste glorious. And please keep the syrup for poaching other fruits. I put some cut-up guavas into the left-over syrup to cook, and my daughter described them as tasting of 'flowers and happiness'.

Winter Pavlova with Pears, Mascarpone and Caramel Sauce

5 extra-large free-range eggs
a pinch of cream of tartar
250 g caster sugar
1 x 250 g tub fresh mascarpone
1 cup (250 ml) fresh cream
1 tsp (5 ml) vanilla extract
¼ cup (60 ml) flaked almonds, lightly toasted to golden-brown in a dry frying pan

For the poached pears: 
5 small, ripe pears
2 cups (500 ml) water
1 cup (250 ml) caster sugar, or light brown sugar
1 whole vanilla pod [optional]
a thin slice of lemon, peel on

For the caramel sauce: 
1 cup (250 ml) caster sugar
5 Tbsp (75 ml) water
½ cup (125 ml) cream
3 Tbsp (45 ml) butter

First make the Pavlova. Heat the oven to 160 ºC. Separate the eggs, placing the egg whites in a spotlessly clean metal bowl. Add a pinch of cream of tartar. (Keep the yolks for making mayonnaise!)

Using an electric beater or a food processor fitted with a balloon whisk, beat the egg whites until they are standing up in stiff, dryish peaks.

Now trickle the caster sugar into the egg whites, a few tablespoons at a time, beating well between every addition. Take your time over this. When you've added all the sugar, continue beating for another 3-5 minutes, or until the meringue is extremely thick, firm and shiny (with no sign of grittiness when you rub a blob between your fingers) and easily holds its shape without drooping. (See Cook’s Notes for more tips)

Line a metal baking sheet with baking paper (put little blobs of meringue on six points under the paper to stick it down). Draw a circle on the paper, using a dinner plate as a template.

The meringue should be very thick & glossy. 

Spread a third of your meringue mixture over the paper, in an even circle. The easiest way to do this neatly is to place a pile of meringue in the centre of the circle, and then - using a palette knife - gently press down and out to create a neat, swirling circle.

Now place generous dollops of the remaining meringue around the edges of your circle (see picture; left).

Place the baking sheet on the middle rack of your oven, and immediately turn the heat down to 110 ºC (oven fan off). Bake for for an hour and a quarter then switch off the oven (don't open the door!) and let the meringue case dehydrate for for at least 8 hours, or until it is crisp and dry.

In the meantime, prepare the pears. Fill a large bowl with cold water and squeeze in the juice of half a lemon.  Using a potato peeler, neatly remove the skin from the whole pears, leaving their stalks intact. Drop each pear, as you've peeled it, into the bowl of lemony water.

The syrup is flavoured with vanilla & lemon. 

To make the poaching syrup, place the water, sugar, vanilla pod and lemon slice in a saucepan, set over a medium heat and bring to the boil. When the syrup begins to bubble, stir it gently until all the sugar crystals have dissolved. Simmer the syrup for a further 5 minutes.

Place the whole pears in the syrup and bring up to a gentle simmer. Cover the pot with a lid, turn the heat down to its lowest setting, and poach the pears for 5-8 minutes, or until they are just soft.

Let the pears cool completely. 

Fish the pears out of their poaching liquid and set aside on a plate to cool. Cut them in half lengthways, leaving a stalk on one half. Using a teaspoon or your thumbnail, gently pop the oval core out of each pear half, tearing it up towards the stalk to remove the fibrous threads.

Put the mascarpone into a bowl and beat it thoroughly until smooth. (It helps to leave it at room temperature for a few hours, until softened.) Whip the cream to a soft peak in a separate bowl, add the vanilla, and gently fold this into the mascarpone.

To make the caramel sauce, spread the caster sugar evenly over the bottom of a dry, thick-based frying pan, and sprinkle over the water.  Cook over a medium-high heat until the caramel is dark, rich golden brown, swirling the pan to distribute the dark-gold areas (see Cook's Notes)  Whisk in the cream, and then add the butter. Stir well and set aside to cool.

To assemble the Pavlova, fill the centre with two-thirds of the cream/mascarpone mixture, and arrange the pears on top, stalks pointing up. Place blobs of the remaining cream on top. Drizzle over the caramel sauce, and scatter the almonds on top.

Serves 6-8.

Cook's Notes

1. The meringue must be really, really stiff and glossy, or it will collapse in the oven.

2. The caramel sauce I've used here is loosely based on Gordon Ramsay's recipe. This is arguably the trickiest part of this recipe, as caramel is temperamental: not only does it burn with alarming speed, but it also has a tendency to crystallise for no apparent reason,  If your caramel suddenly turns thick and grainy after the sugar has melted, it cannot be rescued. Tip it into the bin, and start again in a new dry frying pan. Don't stir the caramel, and use a pastry brush to sweep any grains of sugar off the sides of the pan as it is heating.

3. To catch pears at their peak, place them in your fruit bowl alongside other fruits, which will hasten the ripening process. Check them twice a day by firmly pinching the flesh just below their stalks - when this is just soft enough to yield to the touch, peel and poach them, as described above. You can keep the pears, whole their syrup, for many days, until you're ready to make this dessert.

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Moroccan-Spiced Carrot and Chickpea Salad with Mint & Almonds

I think carrots are both underrated and neglected.  How many classic dishes of world cuisine feature carrots as the starring ingredient? You can count them on one hand: Carrots Vichy, Moroccan carrot salads, spicy Indian carrot pickles, carrot cake and... um... that's four fingers... can someone help me out here?

A flavour-packed vegetarian salad featuring carrots
 in a starring role. 

Truth is, the humble carrot is not a particularly versatile veggie.

Sure, when small and snappy and sweet, it's lovely raw, or lightly cooked in plenty of salty butter. But the minute a carrot reaches the length of a pencil, it tends to be booted like an elderly aunt into stocks, stews and soups, or julienned into coleslaws, or grated and mixed with fresh orange juice and raisins to create the vilest salad known to mankind.

Well, I think we all ought to eat more carrots. They're inexpensive, they're packed with healthy nutrients and fibre, and they have a lovely subtle flavour.

The trick to getting the best out of a carrot is figuring out how to achieve a Goldilocks texture: not too crisp,  not too mushy, but somewhere in between.

Part of the attraction of a good young carrot is its texture (most kids, for example, love slim sticks of raw carrot) but the truth is that you can only eat so many uncooked carrots without feeling as though you're munching  your way through a plateful of twigs.

In the same way, a  bowl of cooked-to-mush carrots can quickly bring on a case of the dry-heaves in children, possibly putting them off this nourishing vegetable for life.

This salad keeps very well in the fridge.

How do you avoid this 'yuck' factor? Here is my solution: cook them to a perfect state of tender-crispness, lightly season them with some North African-inspired spices, and combine them with toasted almonds, chickpeas, parsley, mint, garlic and olive oil.

This salad's dressing may seem pungently flavoured, but when everything has had a chance to mingle over an hour or two, its flavours are quite delicate, and you can still taste earthy carrots below the spices.

This dish improves with keeping, and the carrots will retain their tender-crisp bite for several days in the fridge. It's good on its own, and excellent with hot spicy roast chicken, or shredded chicken from the left-overs of a roast.

Please see my Cook's Notes at the end of the recipe for some variations on this salad.









Moroccan-Spiced Carrot and Chickpea Salad with Mint & Almonds 

For the salad:

1.2 kg carrots (about 14 medium-sized carrots)
salt
1 tin (410 g) chickpeas, well drained
4 Tbsp (60 ml) sultanas
150 g (about two 'wheels') feta cheese
½ cup (125 ml) finely chopped fresh parsley
6 Tbsp (90 ml) finely chopped fresh mint
2 tsp (10 ml) poppy seeds [optional]
6 Tbsp (90 ml) flaked almonds, lightly toasted in a dry frying pan (see Cook's Notes)
extra small fresh mint leaves, for garnish
salt and milled black pepper

For the dressing:

2 tsp (10 ml) finely grated fresh ginger
2 fat cloves garlic, peeled and finely grated
1½ tsp (7.5 ml) cumin
1 tsp (5 ml) good fresh paprika (see Cook's Notes)
½ tsp (2.5 ml) powdered ginger
½ tsp (2.5 ml) cinnamon
the juice of a large juicy orange
the juice of two big lemons
½ cup (125 ml) olive oil
salt and milled black pepper

First make the dressing. Whisk together all the dressing ingredients in a small bowl and set to one side.

Top and tail the carrots and lightly peel them using a sharp potato peeler. Slice the carrots into discs about 3 mm thick. The quickest way to do this is to use a food processor fitted with a metal slicing disc, or a stout-bladed mandolin. If you have neither of these, sit down at a table, turn up the music and patiently slice the carrots by hand.

Bring a pot of salted water to a rapid rolling boil.  Drop in the carrot slices, cover the pot and immediately set a timer to 5 minutes.  When the timer goes, fish out a carrot disc and bite into it. It should be just tender, but with some resistance and snap.  If it feels feels hard and crisp between your teeth, give the slices another minute or two.  Drain the carrots in a colander and then put them in a mixing bowl. Immediately pour the prepared dressing over the hot carrots - their residual heat will take the bite out of the raw garlic and ginger.  Mix in the sultanas and chickpeas, cover with clingfilm and set aside at room temperature for an hour or two, or in the fridge if you are planning to serve this the next day.

Just before you serve the salad, stir in the chopped parsley, mint and (optional) poppy seeds. Pile the salad onto a large pretty platter and crumble the feta cheese on top.  Drizzle over a little more olive oil and scatter the flaked toasted almonds on top. Garnish the salad with some small fresh mint leaves, and season to taste with salt and milled black pepper.

Serves 6 as a main course salad; 8-10 as a side salad. 

Cook's Notes

• Chopped fresh coriander is a lovely accompaniment to carrots, but it does have a domineering flavour which stomps all over the delicate spicing of this dish.
• In place of the flaked toasted almonds, you can use toasted pumpkin or sunflower seeds. 
• If you have a jar of preserved lemons to hand, add some of them, finely chopped, to the salad for a wonderful salty zing. 

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Nectarine Frangipane Tart, with my tips for making feather-light pastry

Every shelf in my local supermarket is brimming with South African summer fruits, and this week the loveliest of them all are plump nectarines in glorious sunset colours. They're delicious eaten raw, but equally good cooked in a rustic, fruity tart filled with a lightly brandied frangipane.

I get hot under the collar when someone nicks a recipe off this site without asking (and you won't believe how often this happens) so I feel a bit guilty about sharing a brilliant and reliable recipe that I personally nicked off someone else 25 years ago.

When I say 'nicked', I mean that I read it in a cook book, tried it, and liked it so much that I typed out the recipe (using an actual typewriter, as we did in those days) and stuck it in my recipe file. I must have made this thirty or forty times over the past two decades, using apples, pears, apricots and plums, and it comes close to what I regard as a perfect recipe. I'm sorry now that I didn't make a note of whose recipe it was, because I would like to shake that person firmly by the hand. (Nowadays, when I write down a recipe, I always make a note of whose recipe it is, and what book it came from.)

In its original form, this was a recipe for (and I recorded at least this part of the recipe) a Normandy Apple Tart. This is a classic French recipe using a crisp pâte brisée (shortcrust pastry), a frangipane of almonds and eggs, and very thinly sliced apples.

Although at first glance this recipe may seem technically demanding - as does any recipe that calls for home-made pastry - it's actually very easy to make, provided that you follow the instructions to the letter.

Before I give you the recipe, here are my top tips and tricks for making light, short, good-looking pastry.

Pastry tips and tricks

1. Use a food processor fitted with a metal blade, if you have one, and forget all this nonsense about using your fingertips. Food-processor pastry produces excellent results because it doesn't have a chance to heat up, is not touched by warm fingers, and is mixed in a jiffy. But don't over-process the pastry.

2. Use very cold butter. A good tip is to place your block of butter in the freezer for an hour or so before you make your pastry, and then grate it onto a pre-chilled plate.

3. Add just enough iced water to bring the mixture together into a crumbly ball, and let the ball turn round no more than six times in the food processor.

4. Don't overwork your pastry. Don't knead it, bash it, pound it or stretch it. The very most you should handle it is to push it together with your fingertips and then pat it out into a little circle. Dip your fingertips in iced water first.

5. Do rest your pastry, covered, for at least half an hour in the fridge.

6. Roll (and you are going to love me for this tip, which comes from Rachel Allen) your pastry out between two sheets of clingfilm. If the clingfilm sheets are too narrow, join several pieces together

7. Use light but firm rolling motions, in all directions. What you want is a smooth, even sheet about 3mm deep, and about 5 cm larger than the size of the tart pan.

8. Use a marble-sized ball of dough to press the pastry well into the corners.

9. Don't trim the edges, but allow them to drape over the sides of the pan; this prevents the pastry from shrinking at the edges. Trim the excess away with a knife when you've finished baking the tart.

10. Prick the base all over, using a fork, in about 40 places, before baking blind.

11. When baking blind, line the pastry with a sheet of proper baking paper (not foil or wax paper) and large lentils or ceramic baking beads. Avoid rice, as it inevitably spills and embeds itself in the pastry.

12. If you're adding a very wet filling (such as soggy apples) brush the bottom of the pastry with beaten egg before you blind-bake it.

13. Watch the tart like a hawk while it is cooking. If the edges are browning too quickly, cover them with narrow strips of foil.

Nectarine Frangipane Tart

For the pastry:
200 g flour
200 g cold butter
a pinch of salt
1 large egg yolk
2-3 T (30-45 ml) iced water

For the filling:
100 g softened butter
100 g caster sugar
1 egg, plus 1 egg yolk
2 tsp (10 ml) brandy
2 T (30 ml) flour
100 g ground almonds
½ tsp (2.5 ml) almond extract or essence
6 just-ripe nectarines, stoned and sliced

To finish:
caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180° C. First make the pastry. Put the flour, butter and salt into a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Process until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs, then add the egg yolk. With the motor running, add the cold water in tiny trickles, until until the pastry just holds together. Remove from the processor, press together into a ball, wrap in clingfilm and place in the fridge to rest for half an hour.

Grease an 22 cm non-stick flan or pie pan. Place a long piece of cling film on your countertop. Put the cold pastry ball on top, and cover with another piece of clingfilm. Using a rolling pin, roll out the pastry into a rough circle about 5 cm bigger than your pan, and about 2-3 mm thick.

Peel off the top layer of cling film, wrap the pastry over your rolling pin, and centre it, pastry-side down, on the pie dish. Gently peel away the clingfilm and, using your fingertips and a ball of left-over pastry, lightly press the pastry into the dish. Allow the edges to drape over the sides of the dish.

Prick the base all over with a fork, cover with a piece of greaseproof paper and fill with lentils or baking beans. Bake blind for about 15 minutes, then remove the paper and beans and bake for a further 5 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.

Using a whisk or electric beater, cream together the butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy. Combine the egg and egg yolk in a small bowl, and then add the egg, a little at a time, to the butter mixture. Add the brandy, flour, almonds and almond extract and stir well to combine.

Tip the frangipane into the cooled pastry case and smooth the top with a spatula. Arrange the nectarine slices in overlapping rows or circles on the filling, pressing them down slightly. Bake at 180° C for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, sprinkle lightly with caster sugar, and bake for another 10 minutes, or until the pastry is golden brown and the filling cooked through. Allow the tart to cool a little, then trim away the excess pastry with a knife.

Serve at room temperature, with whipped cream or vanilla icecream.

Makes one  22 cm tart. Print Friendly

Fresh-Plum and Almond Cake, and a bitter taste in one's mouth

Made in a jiffy in a food-processor, this cake involves no more effort than measuring out the ingredients  and stoning the plums. The result? A light, almond-scented cake concealing hot nuggets of sweet-sour plum. Like all my recent fruit-plus-cake experiments, this is really a cross between a cake and a hot pudding, and it's best eaten warm, on a cold night, in your bed, with lashings of cream or custard.  Or both.

The cake, before it's baked

Plums are in full glut in South Africa now, as they are every autumn, and so ridiculously cheap and luscious that I just can't resist buying them by the basketful.  I can rely on my kids to demolish most of the plums I buy, but there are often a few left-overs rolling around in the fruit bowl, getting softer, sweeter and juicier as they  begin to wrinkle.

Turfing them into a cake for my pudding-crazed family was all I could think of (although I had to make this cake twice before it was just right).

On the subject of 'inventing' a cake: someone emailed me the other day to ask how I make up cake recipes from scratch.  The answer?  Of course I bloody well don't:  I'm not a Delia or a Nigella (the verrry thought!), and I'm certainly not a natural baker. What I do is to take an existing cake recipe - and there are really only four or five good basic formulas for cake - and adapt it.  Most times I use a tried-and-tested recipe from my mum's hand-written cookbook (Jack's Granadilla Cake is a good example); sometimes I refer to my collection of vintage recipe books and pamphlets from the 50s and  60s, which are packed with precise and delicious cake recipes.  You can find books like these in heaps in second-hand bookshops and charity shops - nobody wants them any more.

This is a cake for eating in bed.

Before I give you this recipe, an interesting story about having a bitter taste in one's mouth.  No, I'm not annoyed or feeling sour!  Last week, as we were about to embark on a family camping trip, and bickering as we packed the car and made the padkos, my husband complained that his mouth was filled with a bitter, sour taste.  'I'm not surprised, given your attitude', I snarled, wrestling some sausages into a blikkie. 'Thanks for that, darling,' he growled, shoving the moth-eaten sleeping bags in the boot. 'You'll be so sorry when you find out I've got a brain tumour.'

By the time we were seated around a crackling campfire a few hours later, and with the help of some nice cold white wine and sizzling boerewors, we were all feeling less grumpy, but the bitter taste in Flip's mouth had worsened. No amount of tooth-brushing or rinsing or Coca-Cola-swigging helped, and the foul taste persisted for a full 48 hours. When we got back to Cape Town, he googled the problem, and an extraordinary culprit emerged.

Pine nuts. According to a recent report, eating pine nuts can leave a foul, acrid taste in your mouth for up to three days. This has been dubbed 'pine mouth', says the always-sensational Daily Mail: 'Increasing numbers of people have reported that after eating pine nuts, typically as a snack or in a pesto sauce, they have developed a foul, metallic taste in their mouth lasting for up to two weeks, making practically all food and drink unpalatable.'  

Postscript, February 2013:  Scientists have not yet figured out what chemical compound causes this foul taste; more about this in a 2012 report >  Cause Of Foul Pine Nut Taste Befuddles Scientists.

I was relieved, naturally, that there was no brain tumour (a 'brain tuna', my son called this when he was three), but I was also infuriated that my stash of extremely expensive pine nuts - which I'd hidden in a door compartment in the fridge - had been discovered and demolished.  I was tempted to bliksem him with a rolling pin - but, then again, I reckoned he'd suffered enough.  

It's only today that the bitter taste has finally disappeared. And this plum cake was the first thing that my beloved got to taste, after almost a week of  living with deadened tastebuds. He loved it - well, of course he would!

Fresh-Plum and Almond Cake

6 large ripe plums
2 cups (500 ml) white cake flour

2½ tsp (12.5 ml) baking powder 

a pinch of salt

180 g soft butter
1½ cups (375 ml) caster sugar
4 eggs
1 cup (250 ml) ground almonds
1 tsp (5 ml) almond extract, or essence
1 cup (250 ml) milk

To serve:
100 ml flaked almonds
icing sugar
whipped cream

Heat the oven to 160°C. Line the bottom of a 23-cm non-stick cake tin (preferably a spring-form tin) with a circle of greased baking paper.

Cut the plums in half, along their seams. Remove the pips, using the point of a sharp knife, and set aside.

Sift the flour, baking powder and salt on to a plate. Put the butter, caster sugar, eggs, almonds, almond extract and milk into a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Turn on the processor, and whizz the mixture together for a minute.  Now open the top of the food processor and tip in the sifted flour/baking powder/salt mixture. Whizz, on a high speed, for another minute.  Don't worry if the mixture looks slightly curdled: all will come right in the baking.

(If you don't have a food-processor, simply combine all the ingredients in a large mixing bowl, using a large balloon whisk.)

Pour the batter into the prepared baking tin.  Press the halved plums, cut side up, into the batter. It doesn't matter how far you sink them in - they will all end up at the bottom of the pan.  Tap the cake tin sharply on the counter a few times to pop any air bubbles.  Place in an oven heated to 160°C and bake for an hour and twenty minutes, or until the cake is pulling away from the sides of the tin, and an inserted skewer comes out dry.

In the meantime, put the flaked almonds into a dry frying pan and toast, over a medium heat, until they're just beginning to turn golden brown. (Or toast them on a baking sheet in a moderate oven.) Remove from the heat and set aside.

Take the cake out of the oven, allow to cool for five minutes, and then run a sharp knife around the edges of the tin to release the cake.  Invert the cake onto a plate, flip off the metal bottom of the cake tin, and peel off the baking powder.  Turn the cake the right side up again.  Put the icing sugar into a tea-strainer (or sieve), and generously dust the top of the cake with it.  Sprinkle the toasted almonds over the cake.

Serve warm, with whipped cream.

Makes one 22-cm cake. 

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Audrey's Almond Tart

Audrey Rayner, champion baker, on her wedding day.

My late mother-in-law Audrey Rayner (née Morgan) was a wonderful cook, entirely self-taught, with a particular talent for pastry and cake making. She had a lightness of touch, a fine palate and an innate understanding of good ingredients.

She was also an entirely English cook, producing the sort of fine traditional food that makes grown men weep: the tartest fruit pies, flans and crumbles, the most succulent roasts, the tastiest gravies, the lightest biccies and steamed puddings.

Here is her recipe for Almond Tart, a simple but sublime formula consisting of a light shortcrust pastry, a spreading of excellent home-made raspberry jam and a topping of almond frangipane.

You will notice that this recipe calls for Stork  (a South African margarine or vegetable shortening designed for baking). Audrey wasn't a margarine eater - the very idea of putting it on toast would have appalled her - but she always insisted that vegetable shortening made the lightest and best pastry. Use butter if you like, but Stork is best.

I hesitate to tamper with this recipe, but I have two things to add to it.  One, roll your pastry out between sheets of cling film (and I bless Rachel Allen for this excellent tip), which makes it so easy to handle.

I wanted to show you the whole tart, but my family polished
off most of it before it had even had a chance to cool.

Two: Although Audrey never baked this pastry case blind, you might want to do so if you want a crisp dry bottom on your pastry.

Audrey's Almond Tart

For the pastry:

250 g cake flour
150 g cold Stork margarine, or similar vegetable shortening, or butter, cut into small cubes
about 100 ml ice-cold water (see recipe, below)

For the filling:

100 g soft butter
100 g caster sugar
1 large free-range egg
2 Tbsp (30 ml) self-raising flour
70 g ground almonds
5 ml (1 tsp) natural almond extract, or almond essence
5 Tbsp (75 ml) raspberry jam, slightly warmed

Heat the oven to 190° C. 

First make the pastry. Put the flour and the margarine into a bowl, and rub together with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add the cold water, bit by bit, until the pastry just holds together. Knead lightly with your fingertips and press into a ball. (You can do this quickly in a food processor fitted with a metal blade: use the pulse button to process the flour and margarine, and add the cold water in splashes, through the tube of the jug, until the pastry comes together and forms a mass. Don't over-process the dough).

Wrap the pastry in clingfilm and put it in the fridge while you make the filling.

Using a whisk or electric whisk, cream together the butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy. Whisk in the egg, self-raising flour, almonds and almond essence. Set aside.

Now roll out your pastry. Place a long piece of cling film on a marble slab, or your counter top. Put the cold pastry ball on top, and cover with another piece of clingfilm. Using a rolling pin, roll out the pastry into a rough circle about 20 cm in diameter, and about 2 mm thick.

Grease an 18-cm-diameter flan or pie dish.

Peel off the top layer of cling film. Now flip the pastry over and drape it over the flan dish, without peeling off the upper layer of cling film. Gently ease the pastry into the dish, getting well into the corners, and letting its edges drape over the rim.  When the pastry is sitting comfortably in the dish,  run a rolling pin firmly over the rim to slice away any overhang.   Peel off the top layer of clingfilm and pull away the excess overhanging pastry.

Prick the base of the pastry all over with a fork, and press down on it a circle of baking paper or tin foil cut to about the same size.  Fill the paper with 2 cups of rice or dried beans, and bake blind at 190 °C for 15 minutes, or until the outer rim feels somewhat dry when you tap it with a finger.  Gently remove the paper with the rice, and return the dish it to the oven - turned down to 180 °C - for a further 10-15 minutes, or until the base of the pastry is a light golden colour, and dry to the touch.

Allow to cool for 10 minutes.

Spread the raspberry jam all over the bottom of the pastry case. Place big blobs of the almond filling on top of the jam, and smooth the surface with a spatula, making sure to bring the mixture right up to the edges of the pastry case and form a tight seal, to prevent the jam from bubbling up.

Roll the remaining scraps of pastry into a long rectangle (again, between sheets of cling film) and then cut into thin strips. Put the strips in a criss-cross or lattice fashion across the top of the tart (you can twist each strip first, if you like.)

Bake at 190° C for 20-25 minutes, or until the filling is golden and puffed up. Delicious warm with cream or vanilla ice cream.

Makes one 18-cm tart.


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Pear and Blackberry Almond Crumble

If you're faced with a fruit bowl full of pears which are going to be ripe and perfect for precisely the next two hours before they collapse into brown fur, try this pretty crumble pudding. 

My husband, who was born in England, is putty in my hands when faced with any sort of fruit crumble or cobbler, especially if it involves berries of any kind. He suggested adding the blackberries to the crumble, and the almonds were my idea. This filling is quite tart: add more sugar to the fruit if you like.



Pear and Blackberry Almond Crumble

one small lemon
8 pears
1 punnet blackberries (about a cup and a half)
60 ml (4 Tbsp) white sugar or caster sugar

For the crumble:
200 g cake flour
150 g cold butter, cut into cubes
100 g (about 1/2 cup) white sugar or caster sugar
50 g flaked almonds, plus a few tablespoons extra for topping

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Squeeze the lemon juice into a 28-cm-diameter pie dish. Now peel and core the pears, and cut them into wedges (an apple-wedging tool is perfect for this job).

Add the pear slices to the lemon juice in the pie dish as you prepare them, so they don't go brown. Scatter the blackberries over the pears and then sprinkle with the sugar. Set aside. Put the flour and the butter into the jug of a food processor fitted with a metal blade and process until it resembles fresh, fine breadcrumbs. Add the sugar and the rest of the flaked almonds. Pulse in the food processor until the almonds are well ground.

Cover the fruit with the crumble mixture, making sure that every piece of fruit is covered (but don't press down on the topping). Break up any claggy bits by fluffing them with a fork.

In the meantime, heat a frying pan, add the remaining flaked almonds and toss over a medium heat until golden and toasted.

Bake at 180°C for 40-45 minutes, or until the topping is crisp and the fruit juices are
beginning to seep from the edges. Sprinkle with the toasted almonds.

Serve with cream or custard - or both.

Serves 6-8.


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