Apple and Almond Tart

Rub the cold butter cubes into the 200g of plain flour, the 50g of icing sugar and the 2g of fine salt with your fingertips, lifting the mixture up out of the bowl and letting it fall back so it stays cool.

Stop while it looks like coarse breadcrumbs with a few flakes of butter still the size of peas. Those flakes melt in the oven and leave the layers that make a pastry short.

Beat the egg yolk into the 2 tbsp of ice-cold water.

Pour it over the flour and cut it through with a table knife until the mixture starts gathering into clumps.

Press the clumps together into a ball with your hands, adding a teaspoon more cold water only if it refuses to come together.

Stop handling it the moment it holds. Every extra minute of squeezing develops gluten, and an overworked pastry shrinks back down the sides of the tin in the oven and bakes tough, which is not something you can correct afterwards.

Flatten the ball into a disc about 2cm thick, wrap it and refrigerate for an hour.

Give it the full hour rather than a token ten minutes. The rest hydrates the flour and lets the gluten you did develop relax, and a disc rolled straight from the bowl fights the pin, springs back, and pulls away from the rim as it bakes.

Butter a 23cm loose-bottomed tart tin.

Roll the pastry out on a lightly floured worktop to a round about 3mm thick and 30cm across, turning it a quarter turn every few passes so it does not stick.

Roll the round loosely around the pin and unroll it over the tin.

Ease it down into the angle of the tin without stretching it, lifting the overhang with one hand and pressing it into the corner with the other. Pastry stretched to fit pulls back to its old size in the oven and the sides slump.

Press the pastry into the flutes and leave the excess hanging over the rim.

Prick the base all over with a fork.

Refrigerate the lined tin for 30 minutes.

Heat the oven to 190C/375F.

Bake the case empty before anything goes into it. Frangipane is a wet batter, and on raw pastry the moisture soaks straight down into the base, which comes out pale and sodden and never crisps however long the tart stays in the oven.

Line the chilled case with baking paper and fill it to the top with baking beans or dried rice, pushing them right out into the corner so the sides are held up.

Bake for 20 minutes, until the rim is set and pale gold.

Lift out the paper and beans.

Bake for a further 8-10 minutes, until the base looks dry and sandy rather than damp and translucent.

Trim the overhang off level with the rim with a small knife while the case is still hot, cutting outwards. Trimmed before baking it shrinks below the rim and there is no getting it back.

Turn the oven down to 180C/350F.

Beat the 100g of softened butter with the caster sugar for 3-4 minutes, until pale and visibly lighter. This is the creamed method the lemon drizzle loaf cake in this collection is built on, with ground almonds standing in for most of the flour.

Beat in the eggs one at a time, letting each disappear before the next goes in.

Beat in the vanilla.

Fold in the ground almonds, the 20g of plain flour and the 1g of fine salt until no dry patches are left.

Spread the frangipane into the case in an even layer, no more than two-thirds of the way up the sides, since it rises as it bakes and will swallow anything sitting on top of it.

Use eating apples rather than the Bramleys the apple and blackberry crumble in this collection is built on. A cooking apple collapses to puree, which is what you want under a crumble and not what you want as slices standing in frangipane.

Quarter and core the apples and cut each quarter into 3mm slices, keeping each quarter's slices together as they come off the knife.

Turn the slices through the lemon juice as you go, so they do not brown while you work.

Press the slices into the frangipane in overlapping rings, working from the outside in, curved backs upwards.

Push each slice in far enough to stand up in the batter rather than lie on the surface, or the filling rises around them and buries the pattern.

Scatter the flaked almonds over.

Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the frangipane has risen and set between the slices, the apple edges have caught brown, and a skewer pushed into the filling between two slices comes out clean.

Warm the apricot jam with the tablespoon of water in a small pan for a minute, until it runs off the spoon in a thin stream.

Brush the glaze over the hot tart.

Cool in the tin for 30 minutes, until the filling has firmed enough to cut cleanly.

Push the base up out of the ring and slide the tart off onto a plate.

Cut into 8 slices.

Dust the rim lightly with icing sugar as it goes to the table, rather than earlier, since it dissolves into the glaze within a few minutes.

Serve just warm, with double cream or the vanilla custard in this collection.