Bakewell Tart (vegan, dairy-free and damn delicious)

Bakewell Tart

There’s nothing better than a good cake or tart, and the Bakewell Tart is a British favourite. (Ok, it’s my favourite.)

It’s a tart in three layers: a crisp pastry on the bottom, a thin layer of raspberry jam and an almond-flavoured sponge on top.

If you don’t want to make your own pastry, you can buy a pre-made shortcrust pastry case. We won’t tell anyone.

The ingredients below will be fine for a 23-24cm flan tin. If you’re using a 20cm/8″ tin, just reduce the pastry ingredients to 200g flour/100g margarine and reduce the sponge ingredients by about 10%.

Ingredients

For the Pastry

• 250g of plain flour
• 125g of vegan margarine

For the Sponge

• 160g of self-raising flour
• 160g of ground almonds
• 160g of caster/granulated sugar
• Half a teaspoon of baking powder
• 1½ teaspoons of almond extract
• 180ml of vegetable oil
• 150ml of lukewarm water
• A handful of flaked almonds

Other ingredients

• Raspberry jam, about 1-2 tablespoons. It has to be raspberry for a proper Bakewell tart. However, if you’re not bothered about authenticity, strawberry jam is a good substitute.
• Icing sugar (“powdered sugar” if you’re American) to decorate

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 190 C. Rub the margarine into the flour until it looks like fine breadcrumbs. This will take 5-10 minutes.
2. Add 3-4 tablespoons of cold water until it comes together as a dough. Roll out to about a 3mm thickness, then line a tart tin with it. Prick the pastry with a fork to stop air bubbles from forming, then bake for 10 minutes. Use ceramic baking beans if you’ve got them. Don’t worry if you haven’t; you can use uncooked, dry rice instead. Discard the rice after using it in this recipe – do not eat it.
3. Remove your pastry case from the oven and let it cool for a few minutes while you’re getting the ingredients ready for the sponge layer, then spread a generous layer of raspberry jam over the pastry.
4. Mix together the dry ingredients for the sponge in a bowl. Then add the wet ingredients to it; it will be quite a runny mixture.
   

   

5. Pour it into the pastry case, sprinkle the flaked almonds over the top and bake for 10 minutes, then lower the temperature to 180C and bake for a further 25 minutes.
6. Leave to cool for at least 15 minutes, then dust the top with icing sugar.

A note about the Mr Kipling version

• You can copy the look of the mass-produced, Mr Kipling version of the Cherry Bakewell Tart by icing the top and adding a glacé cherry.
• Just mix 200g of icing sugar with 2-3 teaspoons of cold water to make a thick paste. Spread it over the top of the Tart as evenly as you can. Finish the look with half a glacé cherry in the middle.
• And even though Mr Kipling have removed reference to their cakes containing free range eggs, your Bakewell Tart is a cruelty-free, dairy-free, vegan masterpiece.

Bakewell Tart

This recipe was totally inspired by the former Emily Cooks Vegan website. Her website is no longer there unfortunately, which is a shame as she’s a cooking genius.

Like this? Try these

Macaroni Cheeze (the vegan version of Mac’n’Cheese and it tastes great)
Peanut butter fudge
Vegan Chicken and Mushroom pies
Peverilblog’s Notes from Tokyo. Part 1: on being vegan in Japan