That is an Apricot Tart with Honey and Almonds; for those of you that do not speak french - like me. This is a long standing recipe in our house; one that I just love. I don’t make it all that often, not because there is anything wrong with the recipe, but because I like to wait for apricots to be at their best, fat and ripe and in season. You can make this with canned apricots,which are a good substitute, just not quite the same as fresh.

I know most places in the northern hemisphere will not have apricots just yet, but perhaps you can tuck this away for the longer sunny days when the apricots are juicy and ready to be picked. It’s not far away now for you, even though I know many of you are still in your winter woollens and have snowy views out your windows.

It does take a little time to make this tart, but it’s absolutely worth every minute spent on it. A creamy almond crème patisserie filling dimpled with plump apricots in a crisp light pastry. What more could you want on a summer day?

Before I give you the recipe - just a reminder about the Giveaway, I’m really enjoying seeing the comments and suggestions for a recipe - I really don’t mind how creative you are with your suggestions - test my cooking skills and be adventurous!

Apricot Tart with Honey and Almonds

Pastry cream

• 2/3 cup of whole milk
• 1- 2 inch piece of vanilla bean
• 2 large egg yolks
• 3 Tbspns sugar
• 1 Tblspn of cornflour/cornstarch

One quantity of sweet shortcrust pastry -see pastry recipe here

Filling ingredients

• 1/2 cup of whole blanched almonds
• 1/3 cup of icing sugar
• 1/4 cup of butter - room temperature
• 1 large egg
• 1 tspn almond extract
• pinch of salt
• 6 to 8 apricots halved and stones removed

• 3 Tblspns of honey - to drizzle over

Pour milk into a small saucepan, scrape in the seeds from the vanilla bean and toss in the bean as well. Bring up to a simmer. Remove from the heat.

In a small bowl whisk together the egg yolks, 3 Tblspns of sugar and the cornflour. Gradually add the hot milk to the yolk mixture in a small and steady stream whisking continuously.

Add the mixture back into the saucepan and heat gently until it thickens.

It should look something like this.

Transfer to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap pressed directly on the surface and cool in the fridge.

Roll out your pastry to fit your tart tin chill until firm, I often toss mine in the freezer for about 20 minutes to speed things up.

Preheat the oven to 220C/400F bake your tart crust blind until golden.

For those of you unfamiliar with this term, it just means to place some baking paper on top of your pastry and fill it with beans or pie weights and bake for roughly 10 minutes. Remove the paper and beans and bake for another 5. This is just to ensure that the pastry is crisp and does not absorb the tart filling when you pour it in. It’s a really common method to use when you are baking a tart that has a wet filling.

Cool your pastry crust.

Preheat oven to 180C/350F

Finely grind your almonds and icing sugar in the food processor.

Add this into your cooled pastry cream, stir in your room temperature butter and the egg, extract and salt.

Pour into your cooled crust and arrange your apricots halves on the top

Bake until set and golden- this takes roughly 40 minutes. You might find you need to tent the edges of the crust with foil if they are looking a little brown.

Drizzle with honey while warm, serve at room temperature.

This is a really lovely tart and one that looks so pretty. If you are using canned apricots do drain them well, you do not want a lot of additional moisture from the apricots going into the filling.

I can imagine this working well with peaches,pears or plums as well.

We are getting into late summer here. Sunsets are earlier and the winter clothing stocks are coming into the shops and they are finished with the end of summer sales. I’m starting to keep my eyes open for mushrooms in the forests that are near our house and Isaac is making the most of his waterslide while he still can.

That means apricot season is almost over here, and I’ll put my apricot tart recipe away until next summer when the stone fruit is hanging on the trees and the apricots are ripe again.

My mother found this recipe for Almond Shortbread when we were searching for the cherry butter cookie recipe. The instructions were non existent and the handwriting was difficult to read, some of the recipe quantities we had to guess. That sounded like a challenge I wanted to take on. I decided to make it. Since I associate glace cherries with my Grandmother I opted to make this a Cherry and Almond Shortbread.

I did have a small incident with this shortbread. After I mixed the dough it looked a little on the dry side. After chilling for an hour, it was still a little crumbly, so I then had to backtrack and rub in a little more butter and re-chill. This shortbread has had a little more handling than it should. But despite that, it’s not too bad. Considering the excess handling this had it’s hard to know what it would be like without it. So I will try this recipe again with the increased butter quantities before I give a definitive verdict on it.

Cherry and Almond Shortbread

• 150 grams of butter
• 60 grams caster sugar
• 250 grams flour
• 50 grams of ground almonds
• 1 tspn almond essence
• 1/4 of a cup of glace cherries finely chopped.
• pinch of salt
• 1 tspn baking powder

Preheat the oven to 150C/300F and line two baking trays with parchment

Sift the dry ingredients in a bowl and add in the chilled butter cut into cubes.

Rub the butter into the dry ingredients with your fingers until the dough looks like fine crumbs and will hold together if squeezed. Sprinkle over the almond essence and finely chopped cherries and gently mix through with your fingers.

Bring the dough together into a log and place the dough in plastic wrap and chill for at least an hour.

Cut into rounds or rectangles about 1 cm thick. I used a shortbread mould for mine. You can roll it out on a floured work surface and cut it with a cookie cutter or a knife, if you want rounds slice it straight from the log. Cook for roughly 30 minutes in the centre of the oven. The shortbread should retain it’s light colour. If you see it starting to darken remove from the oven.

I fell in love with Gianduja (pronounced, zhahn-DOO-yuh ) about a year ago when I was looking for something to include in a Christmas gift box for my family. I discovered it on Nila Rosa in the form of Peanut Gianduja. I made it - loved it, and then did not want to give it away. I ended up making another batch just to keep. It’s melt in the mouth delicious and so simple to make. It is a little fiddly coating the chocolates, but oh.. so worth it…

Just three simple ingredients will have the recipients of these chocolates stunned that you made them yourself. They taste amazing and with the use of chocolate transfers they look incredible too. I am not a skilled candy maker, in fact candy and I have a love hate relationship. I love it, but I cannot ever get it right. But this one even I can make. I adapted this slightly from the original recipe.

If you cannot get Almond butter (most health food stores stock it - along with hazelnut and cashew butter) you can use smooth peanut butter. I’ve given you a step by step so you can feel confident making this.

I’m sure there are all kinds of special chocolate making tools that would make this easier. But I wanted to just make this with the ordinary things that most of us would have on hand.

Almond Gianduja

• 250 grams white chocolate
• 250 grams Almond butter
• 300 grams dark chocolate
• 1 sheet of chocolate transfers cut into roughly 1 1/2 inch/3.5 cm squares

Note: It is just equal quantities of white chocolate and a nut butter of your choice. I find this amount is just right for an 8 inch/20 cm square pan

Wear an apron - it’s messy, chocolatey, messy.

First measure out your Almond butter into a bowl

Melt your white chocolate either in the microwave or in a bowl over hot water.

Mix your Almond butter and white chocolate together and pour into a parchment lined 20 cm/8in square cake pan.

This is the filling for your chocolates.

Now put it in the freezer for at least an hour until it is set and cold. It needs to be cold because when you dip it in the dark chocolate to coat - the warm chocolate will soften the filling and you will end up with a puddle instead of a chocolate almond filled marvel.

Once your filling is set and cold, melt your dark chocolate in a bowl over hot water or in the microwave. I like to use the microwave because I am less likely to overheat the chocolate and when it gets slightly thick I can give it another short burst to heat it slightly. You will find you need to reheat your dark chocolate several times while you are dipping and coating.

Place a piece of parchment on a small tray on your work surface - this is where you are going to coat your chocolates and you want a tray that will fit in the fridge.

Take your gianduja filling out of the freezer and cut one strip of filling roughly 1 inch/2.5 cm wide. Put the remaining gianduja in the freezer again. Just work with one strip at a time so that the filling stays as cold as possible. Go back and cut a new strip when you have completed the first, until you have used all the filling.

Cut your strip of gianduja into small squares - roughly 1 inch in size.

On a fork, dip into the melted dark chocolate, making sure that you coat all the chocolate - including the bottom. The filling is soft when thawed so if you have little gaps in your chocolate coating your filling will leak out.

Make sure you scrape off any excess chocolate from the bottom of the fork, I just tend to use the side of the jug I melted the chocolate in. It seems to work ok for me. If your chocolate gets too thick, reheat it slightly.

Place carefully on to your parchment lined tray. Place a square of the chocolate transfer on the top of each chocolate pressing down ever so lightly just to make sure the transfer is in contact with the chocolate.

When you have completed your tray full, pop them in the fridge.

When the chocolate is completely set - don’t be tempted earlier - slowly remove the transfers. This could be about 20 minutes. Be patient - your chocolate needs to be set, if you rush this bit your transfers will not errr.. transfer. I discovered this because I am not a very patient person….at least when it comes to chocolate.

But I know you are patient and will wait to pull off the transfers and this will be your result.

Package up your chocolates if they are going to be a gift - or  just eat them and be proud of yourself for making something gorgeous.

These little moon shaped cookies smothered in a coat of frosty looking powdered sugar are just the epitomy of Christmas. I know all my Christmas cookie posts are late, just think of them as posted well in advance for next year.

These little white morsels with their delicate almond flavour are always the first to go when I put a plate of Christmas cookies out. They are best eaten the day they are made, and everyone seems more than happy to make sure there aren’t any left. This is another of the batches of cookies that Leah and I made together on Christmas Eve.

I don’t honestly remember where on the vast internet I found the recipe for these originally. My apologies to the original author, I like to give credit where it’s due. I have adapted it a little since I found the original recipe a little on the dry side, and difficult to shape. There is a bit of a technique to shaping these cookies. Leah was ready to give up after her first one turned out looking more like a deformed sausage, but after a few tries she had the technique down beautifully.

Viennese Crescents

• 1/2 cup of ground almonds
• 1/2 cup of icing sugar (powdered sugar)
• 1/2 cup of softened butter (it’s important that it is soft)
• 1 1/2 tspns vanilla extract
• 1 tspn almond extract
• 1 cup of flour
• 1-2 tspns cold water
• pinch of salt
• Icing sugar for coating

Beat together butter, almonds and icing sugar until just combined

Add in the extracts and mix gently

Add in the flour and salt and mix until the dough starts to come together. Add the water to make a dough that holds together. Do not be tempted to knead the dough it will make the cookies tough.

Wrap in plastic wrap and chill for 20-30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F and line a baking tray with parchment.

To shape

Take a piece of dough that is slightly larger than a walnut and roll into a ball. Roll the ball into a log shape putting slightly more pressure on the ends to make the log wider in the middle and narrower at the ends. You do not want to make the logs too narrow on the ends or they will burn. Curve into a crescent shape and place on the tray. Leave them a little room to expand.

Bake for about 10 minutes and remove when light golden on the ends. While they are hot, roll in icing sugar to coat. You can give them another coat of icing sugar if you like when they have cooled slightly.

These elegant little cookies are also called Vanillekipferl. They are common in Germany and Hungary although they originated in Vienna. They look so pretty sitting on a plate, and are really very simple to make. Next time you are having an afternoon tea for “ladies” try making some of these as a different addition to your cookie plate.

Please excuse my un-ironed tablecloth in the pics - it was Christmas Eve after all and I had to help Santa with some stuff.

This is one of those things I turn to when I really want to have something sweet to nibble on, but I don’t have much in the pantry and cannot be bothered taking a trip to the store. A simple Almond toffee. It’s nice crushed and sprinkled over icecream or just a little slab eaten with a hot up of tea. You can use any nuts really, but I like almonds or sesame seeds generally. They make me feel less guilty about eating something that is basically pure sugar in a pretty form.

I thought I would try putting some cranberries in for a Christmas-y effect, they worked really well and were a nice counterbalance to the tooth aching sweetness of the toffee. This might be nice with some green pumpkin seeds to add to the seasonal feeling.

Cranberry and Almond Toffee

• 1 cup of sugar
• 1/4 of a cup of water
• 1/4 cup of flaked almonds
• 1/3 of a cup of dried cranberries.

Spread your almonds and cranberries on a lightly oiled oven tray, ready to pour your toffee over. You can lightly toast your almonds in a dry pan if you wish.

Place the sugar and water in a small saucepan on lowish heat, warm and swirl the saucepan gently until all the sugar has dissolved. Do not stir - this will make the sugar crystalise. The idea is to have the sugar dissolve before the syrup boils.

Once the sugar has dissolved you can turn up the heat a little (I find medium heat is fine) and boil your sugar water mix. Watch it like a hawk, do not step away from the saucepan - if you do, it will know and it will burn I promise you.

As soon as your syrup starts to turn golden remove from the heat, it will continue cooking once you have removed it. If you leave it too long it will burn. As soon as it is a light golden shade, pour over your almonds and cranberries.

When cooled break into pieces, it needs to be stored in an air tight container, or it will go sticky, on the other hand, you can just offer it to your families and eat it all at once, which is what tends to happen in our house.