Practise makes perfect, and what better way to improve my baking skills than if I attempted some of the recipes from the show? This week was Tart Week, and for the technical challenge the contestants had to produce a treacle tart, using Mary Berry’s very own recipe. The BBC website had a link to the recipe, I had 2 homemade white loaves almost ready to throw out, it’s Harry Potter’s favourite dessert and quite frankly it would have been rude for me to not give it a go!
The original can be found here, but I altered the quantities slightly so that there would be enough pastry and filling to cover my 23cm loose-bottomed flan tin.
Ingredients:
For the pastry:
375g plain flour
195g butter
For the filling:
600g golden syrup
225g fresh white breadcrumbs (I cut the crusts off my loaves and then blitzed the bread in a food processor to make the breadcrumbs)
3 lemons, zest and juice
1 egg, beaten, to use as egg wash
Method:
Place the flour into a large bowl and rub in the butter with your fingertips until it resembles breadcrumbs (or use a hand-held electric whisk or food processor like I did).
Add about 3 tablespoons of water and mix to a firm dough, wrap in cling-film and chill in the fridge for 20 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius (400 degrees Fahrenheit), Gas Mark 6, and put a heavy baking tray in the oven to heat up. Grease a 23cm loose-bottomed flan tin with butter.
Remove about 150g of the pastry from the main ball and set aside for the lattice. Roll out the rest of the pastry on a lightly floured work surface and line the prepared flan tin. Prick the base with a fork to stop it rising during baking.
Place the reserved pastry for the lattice top on cling-film, roll it out thinly and then egg wash it. Set it aside to chill in the fridge while you make the filling. Don’t cut the strips at this point, and don’t egg wash the strips once they’re on the tart as the egg would drip onto the treacle mixture. Basically, the egg washing needs to be done now!
To make the filling, heat the syrup gently in a large saucepan but do not let it boil. Once melted (ie. thinner than before) add the breadcrumbs, lemon juice and zest to the syrup. You can add as much lemon as you’d like, but the amount above ensured that the filling wasn’t too sweet – it really took the edge off the syrup. If the mixture looks too runny then just add more breadcrumbs – point to mention, have more breadcrumbs on hand than the ingredients call for just in case the mixture is too runny and you’ll need more. Just play it by ear, really.
Pour the mixture into the lined tin and level the surface.
Now for the hard bit! Take the pastry from the fridge and cut into long strips, 1cm wide. I used a pizza cutter for this and be warned: the pastry is sticky from the egg wash and a pain to manoeuvre! Make sure the strips are longer than the edges of the tart tin.
Egg wash the edges of the pastry in the tin and then start to make the lattice pattern over the filling, leaving the strips hanging over the edge. This is particularly tricky as you can’t let the strips touch the filling unless they’re meant to – if the filling ends up on the outside of the pastry strips then when in the oven it’ll colour unevenly (like mine did!). I’m making it sound more complicated than it needs to be, but from my photos of the finished product then you’ll see what I mean!
Once the lattice is in place then use the tin edge to cut off the strips by pressing down with your hands, creating a neat finish. Transfer the flan tin to the pre-heated baking tray and bake for about 10 minutes until the pastry has started to colour, then reduce the temperature to 180 degrees Celsius (350 degrees Fahrenheit), Gas Mark 4. If at this stage the lattice is getting too dark in colour then just make a little hat for the tart out of tin foil.
Bake for a further 35-40 minutes until the pastry is golden brown and the filling set. Remove from the oven and leave to firm up before removing from the tin. Serve warm or cold.
I’d made treacle tart before in Food Tech at school, but it definitely didn’t taste like this! Mary Berry really is a baking goddess – this recipe worked perfectly. However, my pastry had a good bake but a slight soggy bottom: my tart could have done with a longer stint in the oven. I was also a bit disappointed with my lattice, but never having done one before I was pleased with the design but not with the uneven colour. Plus, for some reason the pastry I used for the lattice cracked when I was rolling it out so it just fell to pieces when trying to arrange it on top of the mixture. Bit of a nightmare but in the grand scheme of things, I can cope with that! The taste was good – I’d really recommend the addition of lemon. You can’t taste anything too citrusy at all – it just cuts through the overt sweetness of such a ridiculous volume of golden syrup!
Try it out – you’ll get the satisfaction of producing a Mary Berry tart but without the prospect of (the silver fox himself) Paul Hollywood’s criticism. And, if you can think of enough pastry-related innuendos while baking then you can pretend like you’re actually in the tent, surrounded by union flag bunting and being cheered on/consoled by Mel and Sue like you’re really on the GBBO… not that I did that, of course…
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