Creamy Apple Tart
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.