Another culinary delight this evening, which I thought up lying in bed last night! This apricot & marzipan tart was designed partly to use up a spare piece of marzipan to complement some apricots. Like much of what I cook, it’s rustic because doing precisely pretty isn’t my thing.

Ingredients

• 1 pack puff pastry
• 2 punnets fresh apricots (or indeed any stone fruit)
• marzipan
• 50ml Amaretto (or similar almond liqueur; or Cognac)
• 1tsp almond essence
• ½tsp sugar
• glacé cherries (optional)
• candied peel (optional)
• flaked almonds (optional)
• butter for greasing
• 1tsp icing sugar for dusting (optional)

What to do

1. Preheat the oven to 220C/fan 200C (or according to the pastry instructions).
2. Rinse and halve the apricots, removing the stones and blemishes.
3. Grease a 20cm (or thereabouts) flan tin.
4. Rollout the pastry as thinly as possible, and line the tin. Trim off any excess pastry (and keep it). Prick the base all over with a fork.
5. Line the case with baking parchment and add baking beads (or dried beans).
6. Blind bake the pastry case for 10 minutes.
7. Meanwhile mix the Amaretto, almond essence and sugar to make a glaze.
8. Slice (or roll) the marzipan quite thinly (2mm is good) so you have enough to cover the base of the tart.
9. When blind baked, remove the pastry case from the oven, and remove the baking beads (this will be easier if you have the parchment to pick up).
10. Cover the base of the tart with marzipan, using fragments to fill the corners and gaps.
11. Brush the marzipan with the Amaretto glaze.
12. Now layer the apricots on the marzipan, in whatever decorative manner you wish.
13. Brush the apricots, and exposed pastry with glaze.
14. Add a few glacé cherries, a sprinkle of candied peel, and a sprinkle of flaked almonds if wished.
15. Bake for about 30 minutes until beginning to colour and the apricots are soft.
16. Remove from oven, and while still hot brush the apricots with any remaining glaze.
17. Allow to cool until still slightly warm before removing from the tin, dusting with icing sugar (if wished) and serving either nude or with some thick double cream and a glass of Armagnac.

If you have some apricot halves left over (as I did) use them with the pastry offcuts. Reroll the pastry (no it doesn’t do puff a lot of good, but what the hell) to make some roughly 15cm squares (they don’t have to be neat). Brush the pastry with the Amaretto glaze. Put an apricot half or two or three on each piece of pastry, with a glacé cherry if wished. Fold the pastry over the fruit, seal and glaze. Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes.