daring baker's june challenge: bakewell tart!

so I am a big dork, and joined a baking-blog collective the daring bakers. I thought it would be fun to challenge myself once a month to do something I hadn't completely planned. This month's challenge was the bakewell tart--basically a crusty pie tart filled with jam and covered with a frangipane cream (my favorite: ALMOND!)

I designed a recipe using a few elements from the Tartine cookbook, one of my favorites. The recipe (with pictures) follows.

Pie Crust (half of the Flaky Tart Crust recipe from Tartine):

1/3 cup cold water
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1.5 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt

Mix salt and water and put both in a bowl in the refrigerator to keep cold (I've never seen this technique before but I like it.)

Cut butter into the flour in one inch pieces. Keep pulsing until mixture forms crumbles. Then, slowly drizzle in the cold water/salt mixture, until the mixture forms what Tartine dubs a "shaggy mass" (which just makes me think of scooby doo.) Continue to mix until a dough forms. Wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Frangipane:

2 cups ground almonds
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter (one stick)
2 eggs
1/2 tsp. almond extract
salt to taste

cream butter and sugar in a food processor, blender, or by hand. Add eggs and beat well. Finally, stir in ground almonds and extract. It should look a bit like this:

Assembly:

For my Bakewell tart, I used fresh blueberries instead of jam. I lined a 9 inch pie pan with parchment paper and pressed the pie dough flat inside of it, pushing up along the edges to form a crust. I then filled the bottom of the pie with fresh blueberries, which I covered with the frangipane. I baked the pie at 375 for roughly a half hour, until it was brown on top:

And then devoured with a special blueberry-mint sauce:

Blueberry Mint Sauce

1/2 cup fresh blueberries
1/4 cup sugar
1 tb. water
1 tb. butter
1 quarter chopped mint

Heat blueberries and sugar in a small saucepan with 1 tb. water. Wait until the blueberries become liquid and begin to bubble. Add butter and mint and stir well.


Hooray June--fresh blueberries, fresh mint, and, naturally, almonds....