Treacle tart a la hairy

Yup the hairy bikers do treacle tart to. Its as lot less forbidding than Heston's recipe, taking up  a mere half page of text. The pastry is a lot less rich too. As you can see.

I'm only going to use half that butter, so its a much more standard pastry making procedure, cold hands cubed butter, 15 mins rubbing in. We also get to skip the fridge hokey-cokey that the tart bases required in the perfection recipe. In fact its even suggested you make the filling first to give it time to soak into the breadcrumbs properly.

The pastry came together ok, but didn't fill the house with the wonderful scents from the perfection pastry, but then it didn't cramp my hands & lurk in the fridge either. Also when the hairies say enough for a treacle tart to serve 6, they are much closer than Heston's mass catering effort. My friends & neighbours won't be pleased though. I was planning on leaving the golden syrup unaged, till I found the tin on the back of the shelf which had aged quite nicely on its own, in fact it had aged enough to separate. That's an easy thing to take care of, just heat the syrup & stir. Heating the syrup is usually wise anyway coaxing a full tin of cold syrup out into a bowl is a real chore. Remember to loosen the lid though or you'll have to duck.

The internet solved the breadcrumb problem quite neatly. Behold the mini-chop. Whilst my kitchen is in need of the TLC only a partial rebuild can supply this is very useful, taking up very little space and being on hand for choppy jobs at a moments notice. I expect as we head toward the warmer time of the year it'll be pressed in to making curry  pastes and the like.
The filling was really simple, using a bit of lemon zest, rather than buerre nuisette from last time. The whole lot went into one blind baked case and into a slow oven for half an hour.
Onward to the bit you've been waiting for.

As you can see the filling is denser & deeper than the perfection tart. The pastry is probably a little better made than the perfection pastry, but that might just be the fact its a more standard short crust. What you can't tell is that it's no where near as fragrant as the perfection tart. It tastes like treacle tart, good treacle tart. Unfortunately it can't really measure up to the gold standard that Heston sets. That said this is pretty easy to make, and not much more than 2-3 pounds worth of ingredients. The perfection tart costs more to make and requires a much larger time investment, but the results are worth while. Keep this one for quick entertaining (or cynically guests you are less fond of) and break out the perfection tart when you have prep time and really want to impress