Rhubarb bakewell tart.

If you've never had one before, a bakewell tart is usually a sickly sweet cake you get from the bakers when you're a kid in a small town in Wales and don't know any better. It's a pastry shell with a layer of (usually strawberry) jam at the bottom. Then a really dense, too sweet, almond sponge, and then a thickthick layer of bright white royal icing and a gross glace cherry on the top. Sorry if you love glace cherries, they just make me want to vom.

So this is a much less sweet version, a lot less sickly and maybe 10 x more delicious? And a physalis looks so much nicer than a plasticky red cherry! In your face, glace.

You'll need:

Pastry. You can either buy it ready made (I'm so lazy) or make a simple shortcrust.

2 cups plain flour

1 cup sugar

3 tsp baking powder

2 cups ground almond

1/2 cup sunflower/canola oil

3/4 cup water

Your choice of jam. I used my favourite rhubarb and redcurrant one, but seriously, any flavour would be great.

For the icing, 1 cup icing sugar

4 tsp water

Ps. This icing is a pain in the butt. I'm warning you now. It tastes authentic and everything but it hates being rolled out and it won't lie flat and it'll make you want to scream. Totally worth it though, promise!

So, put all the ingredients from the flour to the water into a pan and stir it all up.

It'll look kind of lumpy but that's just the almonds doing their thing.

Put the bowl to one side and either make your pastry from scratch (extra points), or grab your pre-made stuff and flour up your rolling pin. Roll it out big enough to cover your pie dish (or dishes if you're making little ones).

Cut it out and lay it into your dish, then spread a layer of your choice of jam over the bottom. Any flavour. Don't make it too thick though.

Cover the jam with the almond mix, just below the top of the pastry.

Whack that bad boy into the oven at gas mark 5/190C/375F. If you're making a little one, it takes around 25 minutes, a big one is about 35.

When it looks like this, puffy and brown, take it out.

The ones you can buy are always super flat so you could slice the top off if you really wanted to.

Here comes the annoying part. Don't start making it until the tart has cooled because it dries out quickly and if you put it on top of a hot tart it'll go all melty and weird.

Put the icing sugar into a bowl. Add the 4 tsp of water and mix it in. It'll be a pretty dry mix but it needs to be so you can roll it out.

Dust your worktop and rolling pin with more icing sugar and put the lump of icing on it. Quickly roll it out before it dries up.

Use your pie dish or a plate or something to cut around to get the right sized piece.

Then smoothly try and pick it up (it breaks easily) and move it over on top of the tart. Look how bumpy!

You could put a cherry on top, or even a tiny piece of stewed rhubarb, or a blueberry, anything you like. I went with a physalis because it kind of looks like a cherry.

It really is pretty delicious, I hope you try it.

We meet again, washing up.

ps. I got rid of that buggy CSS menu that was around here, it wasn't working for some people. If you click the sweet or savoury links at the top, they should take you to recipe indexes now, hope that makes it easier! Let me know if it doesn't work for any of you and I'll get ON IT. xx