Belgian Tart

For our next trick, mum and I decided to tackle one that looked a little safer than the omelette that we attempted last week. It wasn't exactly clear what a Belgian Tart was supposed to be, but given the ingredients it had to be some kind of biscuity thing, right?

I was expecting that we'd be looking at some kind of shortbread, but never having made shortbread, even once we'd made the dough I had no idea if that was on the right track. There was nothing for it but hope that we'd got the mix right, divide the dough in half and slather it in jam. When a recipe calls for 'apricot or raspberry jam' it's going to take something really incredible to make me chose raspberry, and since we had a new jar of extremely promising looking apricot provided by a friend who'd purchased it from Balaclava High School the previous weekend there really wasn't any competition.

So far the recipes have been pretty good at giving us exact amounts, but here we had to take a bit of a guess at what Mrs. W. Broderick of Riverton considered a 'thick layer' of jam, and to skip ahead a little, I can report that our diners were in two minds as to whether or not we'd used enough here, with one commenting that they hadn't even realised that there was any jam at all until right near the end. It's definitely true that the dish was mostly about the pastry, but for my money this amount of jammy goodness was just about right. And it left plenty of jam in the jar to enjoy later, too.

The tart looked extremely satisfying coming out of the oven, though it was a little difficult to lever out of the tin, definitely a case of the cook getting a piece that looked a little more mangled than everybody else's. I really have to remember to utilise baking paper one of these weeks. The pastry smelt divine and turned out more like a crumbly pie crust than a biscuit, and fell apart in the mouth very nicely. It definitely benefited from being served hot from the oven (not least because hot slivered almonds are just *mwah*), and I suspect the whole thing might have been a little dry and bland if it had been left to cool. It was probably a little on the dry side anyway, but it wasn't anything that a little dob of cream couldn't counter.

All in all, a big winner, with four ticks of approval from the four diners, who all got a decent-sized slab of dessert and who would all happily eat it again some time soon. Definitely an example of something that I wouldn't define as a 'pudding', but October 31st gets a big 'yes please' from us. I've decided not to try and rank the puddings or anything so crass as all that, but this one is definitely right up there.

It seems like it might be fun to keep track of all the big-ticket items that we're using a lot of over the course of the progress through the calendar. I'm not going to bother with conversions unless they're easy, though, because I am terrible at them at the best of times. So, over the course of three puddings:

• Eggs: 9 (8 separated)
• Sugar: 2 cup, 2 tbsp
• Butter: 3 3/4 oz, 2 tbsp