Apricot Almond Slice

Crumbly pastry, sweet nutty filling, tart glazed apricots – lovely contrasting flavours and textures. A riff on a Smitten Kitchen recipe for Apricot Pistachio Bars, which sounded lovely, but didn’t quite work for me. This is even easier to make and I had a load of almonds already, so saved a small fortune on pistachios. The green filling would have been pretty though.

• 125g plain flour
• 115g cold butter – I like salted butter, but if you don’t, then add a pinch of salt too
• 25g caster sugar
• 25g whole cane sugar – adds caramel flavour to the pastry, but all caster sugar would be fine

• 220g almonds
• 140g butter
• 130g caster sugar
• 2 tablespoons plain flour
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
• 2 large or 3 medium eggs

• 9 apricots
• 2 tablespoons apricot jam

Heat oven to 180°C. Prepare a 23cm square tin – either grease it with butter, or line with paper.

For the pastry base, pulse together the flour, butter and sugar(s) in a food processor until you have sawdust-like crumbs. Tip them into the tin and press into an even layer. Apricot nail polish, as modelled by Nellie, would be appropriate for your fingers. There’s no need to blind bake the pastry we found.

The filling can be made in the food processor too – no need to clean it first. Grind the almonds first, but not so much that you get almond butter. A few knobbly bits will be good to eat later. Then add the butter, sugar, flour and cardamom and pulse to blend, before finally incorporating the eggs into the mixture. Spoon it onto the pastry base and spread evenly with a spatula.

Slice the apricots and arrange in a natty pattern like we did, or whatever strikes your fancy, on top of the almond filling.

Bake for an hour, turning it half way through, so it cooks evenly. If the apricots catch and starting to burn, cover with some foil for the last 10 minutes or so. Warm the jam in the microwave. to liquify it. Once the tart has cooled, use a brush to glaze the top and admire your creation.

March 1st 2021 – variations – other sharpish fruit works well. I just made this with about 8 sticks of rhubarb instead of apricots and some caster sugar sprinkled over. I also didn’t have enough butter, so used 100g butter, plus 50g ricotta in the filling, which worked well. It didn’t work so well that I forgot to line the tin with paper, although it still came out OK.