The Core Facts

Overall verdict: It tasted like a restaurant-quality dessert, despite being overbaked. The apple + frangipane filling makes for a heavier tart but the flavours were impressive.
Timings: 30 mins prep + 1 hour baking
Sugar: 245g
Butter: 455g
Type of apple: Braeburn

The Long Peel

I don’t know why I’ve decided to start doing ‘apple + other ingredient’ recipes already. This is only the 8th bake of the project so I definitely haven’t exhausted the apple-only options yet. But I liked the look of this Alastair Little apple and amaretti tart recipe and I hadn’t seen or eaten an amaretti biscuit since the 90s so I decided to give it a go.

The Pastry

This is one of those recipes where ‘sweet pastry’ is listed as one of the ingredients and you have to follow a link for details on how to actually make it. The link took me to a recipe for pâte sablée (shortcrust pastry in English), which is used for a variety of pastry cases. It uses the ‘rubbing in’ method for flour and butter to create a sandy texture.

A quick bit of Googling taught me that the alternative pâte sucrée uses the creaming method for sugar and butter for sweet tarts. I used pâte sucrée on both the Clodagh McKenna apple pie recipe and the Darina Allen apple pie recipe if you want to see the difference. Pâte brisée meanwhile also uses the rubbing in method but is deployed for savoury tarts.

The Apples

The apples get a brief pre-cook in Alastair’s recipe. He advises the use of lemon juice to stop them going brown and that worked well, as you can see below.

Alastair’s tart has a frangipane filling with two crushed amaretti biscuits mixed in (two more amaretti biscuits are later crumbled on top.)

The Bake

Alastair asks for 30 minutes at one temperature and then another 30 at a lower setting. I followed his instructions carefully but my end product looked dry.

My usual dish is deeper than the one Alastair had in mind, which explains the well-fired edges – a shallower dish would have given me less exposed pastry. But the apple and the frangipane also felt overbaked to me.

The Dish

A shallower dish is probably preferable, to remove the high crust of overbaked pastry.

The Hot Slice

Disastrously, I failed to take a photo of a single slice of this tart, so you’ll have to trust me that it actually looked quite nice.

The Rested Result

You can see that there’s a soft and delectable tart below the dry top:

If We Repeeled

• Use a shallower pie dish
• Try baking it for slightly less time so it wasn’t so dry

Scores

Simplicity of bake: Not hugely difficult
Pastry texture: The base was maybe a little on the heavy side, although the added frangipane makes it difficult to tell where the pastry stopped and the frangipane started
Pastry taste: Good – it tasted like a quality buttery pastry
Apple texture: It retained its bite even with the pre-cook
Apple taste: I found that the frangipane overpowered the apple in terms of taste but when you got pieces of apple on their own they were still good and tart
Apple to pastry ratio: I always prefer more apple but it was fine for this type of tart
Overall score: 7