bakewell tarts

The June Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart... er... pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800's in England. Recipes are on the host blogs.

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Alrighty. I think I mentioned that I joined The Daring Kitchen, which has monthly baking challenges and monthly cooking challenges. This was this past month's Daring Baker's Challenge (which I think I was supposed to post yesterday, which was the reveal date, but I totally forgot).

I made mini bakewell tarts. Mostly because things in miniature are awesome (in my opinion). These appear to be pretty similar to the baked tarts they sell at Sarah's, where I was working (my last day was last Thursday, how sad), in terms of pastry crust + fruit (jam here) + almond cream (frangipane). I made these for Bible study snacks for GCF, they disappeared pretty quickly.

I stood in the jam aisle at Wegman's to figure out what to use. I wasn't quite in the mood to make my own jam (though I did do that this past weekend with the roomies, we made strawberry freezer jam but that's another story). I decided for blackberry, plus some canned pears, and some chocolate (not all together, as you'll see in the pictures below). Emily has rubbed off on me, I couldn't just use pear jam (though pear + almond is a pretty delicious combination), because then the whole thing would've been beige.

So, pre-filling:

blackberry jam

blackberry jam + canned pear slices

chocolate chips

Coming out of the oven:

I put an almond slice on the plain blackberry ones- I think this caused some confusion at bible study, cause these were the most that were left.

And a little pear slice on top of the blackberry-pear:

And a little chocolate chip on top of the chocolate ones:

They were, suffice to say, delicious. I will have to make these again sometime. Perhaps a larger tart next time, but I love bite-sized things. They're just that much cuter.

And so pretty inside!

I had a lot of dough but only a little bit of frangipane (the almond cream filling) left, so I made this free-form "large" tart- by large I mean it was probably about 5 inches in diameter. A layer of jam, some pear, and almond filling. Mmm.

I made 1 batch of frangipane but 2 batches of the shortcrust pastry dough, to make 48 mini-tarts. (This makes sense, since when you reduce size, for the same volume [frangipane filling] you'll increase the surface area [pastry crust]. See, some of my education is occasionally useful. Only occasionally.)