Don’t be put off by making pastry, if you have never done it before. It isn’t as difficult as you think. But if you don’t fancy it, you can buy shop bought shortcrust pastry and then make your own filling.
Start by preparing your muffin baking tins. This recipe makes 12 small tarts, so using a piece of paper with a blob of butter on, grease the inside of all the cups in the baking tin, so that the pastry won’t stick.
You will be putting the pastry directly into the baking tins, rather than paper cases, like you do when making sponge. The reason for this is that the pastry needs to get hot, to enable it to cook properly. It wouldn’t get as hot if it was protected by paper.
Pastry Ingredients:
175g plain flour
75g butter
25g icing sugar
1 large egg
Frangipane filling:
150g margarine
150g ground almonds
150g white sugar
3 eggs
1 ½ tablespoons plain flour
1 teaspoon almond extract
12 teaspoons of strawberry jam
Handful of flaked almonds
To make the pastry, make sure the butter is nice and soft, so it will mix easily. Mix the butter, flour and icing sugar together until it starts to look like breadcrumbs. You can use your fingers or the mixer for this.
Then use the bread hook on your mixer or a large spoon to add the egg and bring the mixture together to a dough. Stop mixing as soon as it all comes together. Then put the pastry in the fridge while you make the frangipane, which is the almond mixture that makes up the tarts. There is no need to wash your mixing bowl, just add the margarine and sugar to the bowl and whisk together. Then whisk in the eggs, followed by the ground almonds, flour and almond essence. The mixture will look a bit lumpy and curdled, but that is fine.
Put it to one side for now.
Get your pastry out of the fridge and roll it out onto a surface that has been sprinkled with flour, to stop it from sticking, until it is quite thin. Then cut 12 circles of pastry with a large cutter. The pastry circles need to be large enough to go inside the cups of the baking tin, right to the top.
Then fill each pastry cup with about half a teaspoon of raspberry jam, followed by the frangipane filling, until almost to the top.
Sprinkle each one with flaked almonds and bake for 20 – 25 minutes at 180 degrees. You will know when they are ready because they will be firm and the just starting to go brown. Leave them to rest until they cool down and take them out of the tins by easing a knife underneath the pastry.
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