Pastry week! I decided to challenge myself and make the pastry from scratch, which I've not done for about 10 years. Frangipane is one of the challenges on this week's Bake Off and I've never tried it before so this was extra incentive to have a go. I chose a recipe from Little Pod this time to mix things up a bit.
The first instruction was to put a tablespoon of water into the fridge. This sounded pretty odd. To make the dough I used the mixer to make breadcrumbs out of the gluten free flour, salt, butter, icing sugar, and lemon zest. Then went in an egg yolk and the cold water to knead into a dough. This was an incredibly wet consistency so I made slightly more of the breadcrumb mixture to make it more doughy rather than cakey. This worked to an extent. I wrapped this in a bowl with clingfilm and left in the fridge to chill for an hour.
Meanwhile I made the frangipane filling. This was done by mixing ground almonds, an absolute tonne of butter, icing sugar, and eggs. This resulted in quite a wet mixture again, whereas the recipe suggested it should be more breadcrumby. I added a bit more flour to make up the difference where I hadn't bought enough almonds, and this seemed to give it a slightly better texture. I covered this over and waited for the pastry to chill.
The pastry dough did in fact stiffen up a bit whilst in the fridge which made me feel a bit more confident. On a lightly (and later heavily) floured surface I attempted to roll out the pastry until it was thin and use it to line two sandwich tins. Gluten free pastry dough is incredibly crumbly and every time I tried to pick it up or turn it, it just fell apart. So in the end I rolled it out thin and just patched all the crumbled bits together using the back of a spoon. This made it quite uneven in places but it did the job. This was popped back into the fridge for another half an hour to chill.
As I don't own any baking beans (still) I used a couple of small dishes to sit on top of a sheet of baking paper in each tin to blind bake the pastry for 20 minutes, although I took them out a bit early as they looked quite brown. This is probably due to my patchwork effort. I didn't bake any extra without the weight as it looked ready to crumble.
Finally, a layer of apricot jam was spread onto the base (I tried to use it as glue to stick the pastry back together...) and then the cases were filled up with the frangipane filling. This was topped with some flaked almonds and baked in the oven until golden brown and the toothpick came out clean.
I was actually really pleased with these overall, despite the pastry being crumbly. The lemon zest really gave flavour to the pastry and I found I really enjoy frangipane filling. I made two tarts, one for the house and one for Bake Off night. My housemate told me it was so bad she should take it to her room to dispose of it ;)
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