I had to ice my first fruitcake at the weekend after offering to bake his favourite cake to my father-in-law for his birthday. I don’t particularly like fruitcake so I had never made one before, and I had never iced a cake in my life. So a weekend of firsts, and at very short notice!
I ended up cheating a bit by buying a (nice) ready-made fruitcake but I did get some icing. Unfortunately, it’s only on the Saturday morning that I realised that the marzipan hiding in my cupboard was over a year old so I sent Badgerman to the shops about an hour before we were due to leave. It was a bit stressful.
He came back with the most delicious-smelling brandy marzipan, which I clumsily laid out on the cake before doing the same with white icing. It was a very lumpy looking thing in the end but decent enough for a first attempt. You can tell I’m more of a ‘substance over style’ sort of baker.
However there was a lot of marzipan left, and I was determined not to waste it, hence my never-tried-before made-up-on-the-spot Apricot and Marzipan Tart. I had no idea whether or not it was going to work but my hope was that the marzipan would melt a bit.
I can confirm that it did indeed melt and it was one of the tastiest – and easiest – tarts I have ever made. The smell alone was pure (alcoholic) heaven.
Ingredients
500g ready-to-roll puff pastry
about 200g Marzipan – whatever is left over from other baking projects
6 fresh apricots
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp icing sugar to sprinkle at the end
Method
- Pre-heat the oven to 180C.
- Roll out the pastry on a baking sheet.
- Roll the marzipan to about 2 mms thin and put on top of the pastry, leaving about 1 cm of pastry clear all the way around.
- Cut the apricots into quarters and distribute them over the marzipan.
- Paint the egg over the pastry sides.
- Bake for 25 minutes.
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