Creamy Apple Tart

3:10 pm on 27 July 2012

Ready in 1 hour 10 minutes
Serves makes 18 slices

Ingredients

  • 400g frozen ready-made sweet short pastry, thawed
  • 4 large Granny Smith apples
  • 3 medium (size 6) free-range eggs
  • ½ cup caster sugar, plus a little extra for top of apples
  • Vanilla seeds scraped from quarter of a vanilla pod
  • 1 Tbsp lemon juice
  • 120ml cream
  • Finely grated zest 1 lemon
  • 1 cup smooth apricot jam and a squirt of lemon juice

Method

1 Roll pastry and line into a tart tin (28cm long by 20cm wide, or similar) and chill.

2 Preheat oven to 190°C (regular). Peel quarter and core apples, then slice thinly.

3 Put eggs in a bowl, whisk to break up, then briefly beat in sugar and vanilla seeds. Add lemon juice (remove zest from lemon before squeezing) and cream and beat for 2 minutes (easily done with a hand-held electric beater). Mix in zest by hand (it will stick to the beaters).

4 Arrange apples in pastry and pour over custard. Sprinkle with caster sugar. Bake for 35 minutes, until pastry is a good deep golden colour and apples have coloured a little on the top. Remove tart from oven and cool for 10 minutes. Brush carefully with hot apricot glaze. When cool, remove from tin.

5 To make the apricot glaze, pass jam through a sieve set over a small saucepan. Heat it gently, stirring. If it is very thick, thin with a little lemon juice. If it is thin and won't stay coated to the spoon, reduce it a little until thicker. Leftover glaze will keep in the fridge like jam.