Apricot Crumble Tart

This week's selected recipe at Cook The Book Fridays (CtBF), is Apricot Crumble Tart. CtBF is an online group of bloggers who are currently cooking through David Lebovitz's cookbook, My Paris Kitchen.

Apricot Crumble Tart is a delicious tart, which has a base made with buttery dough, the filling with fresh apricot slices and the top is a crumble made with whole almonds, sugar, flour, butter, vanilla extract and ground cinnamon.

For the dough, I have reduced the amount of sugar by half, as I prefer my tart bases to be less sweet. With the reduced amount of sugar, the dough turns out really well too. Secondly, I have used canned apricots for the filling instead of fresh. I did not reduce the sugar for the filling, using the full amount of 3 tablespoons as mentioned in the recipe. Even though the canned apricots are soaked in syrup, I was very surprised to find that the apricots are very tart and not sweet at all and have even sprinkled an extra tablespoon of sugar. I have omitted the almond extract for the filling. (my seldom used little bottle of almond extract has expired!  oops...)

The crumble topping is made by processing whole almonds in the food processor along with flour, brown sugar, vanilla extract, ground cinnamon until the almonds are broken up into very small pieces. Chopped cold butter is added in, and pulse until the mixture clumps together. Refrigerate until needed. 

I have omitted the salt for both the dough and the crumble topping since I've used salted butter.

The dough is press on the bottom of a greased 9" springform pan, covering a little less than halfway up the sides. Place the pan in the freezer for 30 minutes before blind bake by covering the dough with foil with pie weights for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and weights, then continue to bake for another 5-10 minutes until the dough is brown.

Add the filling to the baked shell evenly. Then crumble the topping over the apricots and continue to bake until the crumble topping is browned.

This tart smells incredibly delicious from the cinnamon, vanilla and the nutty almonds. I thought that this tart is really good! The base of the tart is buttery and tender. The apricot filling is tart and not too sweet, which is really nice. I love the crumble topping. It was fragrant from both the vanilla and cinnamon, buttery and nutty. The three layers are so perfect together! 

Served with a scoop (or two!) of vanilla ice cream! Yummilicious!

To view everyone's lovely tart at CtBF, the link is here. If you have the book or thought of getting one, please do, and join us! Full details here.