Our third and final entry this time is from Sarah Haynes @sarahhcakes who loves to bake all sorts of delicious goodies which you can see on her Twitter page.

As soon as my hubby Doug has had chance to look at the entries, he will give his verdict in the next couple of days. In the mean time, I will be posting up another Yorkshire Bake Off challenge, so please do have a go, it is great fun!

Here’s how I got on:

I was absolutely bricking it making this treacle tart as pastry is not my strong point.  I only learned to make it two years ago when I bought the very first Great British Bake Off book as a way of trying to face up to the baking demons.  As many of you out there may have experienced, we either have very good or dreadful experiences of cookery lessons in school.  Up until the age of 11 I loved to bake for my family using my Ladybird cookbooks I was given.  Every Sunday teatime we would have a cake or buns that I had made.  Then, all that changed as soon as I went to High School.  I was eagerly looking forward to my cookery lessons, after all I could make cakes so pastry wouldn’t be a problem, or would it?  We were asked to make a sausagemeat pie with shortcrust pastry and all I remember now nearly 30 years later is that mine was grey and watery. The teacher was nasty to me and said I was hopeless.  In fact after that I began to think I was hopeless at cooking so the seeds of doubt set in my mind!  If that old dragon of a teacher is still alive today I would like to go up to her and shove her head into one of my cakes!  So, after that day back in 1983, I was convinced I couldn’t make pastry and if I needed to make it out would come the frozen Jus-Rol!

So, back to yesterday.  I feel a lot more confident now, thanks to more experience and the brilliance of cookery writers like Mary Berry.  I got out my food processor to start making the pastry and weighed out the ingredients hoping for the best.  I was so glad of Mary’s fab tip to slip the bottom of the tin under the rolled out circle of pastry so that it was much easier to put in the tin, also the chilling of the pastry I followed to the letter. I also warmed a baking tray up in the oven and it did make a difference!

My biggest mistake was by my only loose bottomed and fluted tart tin was far too big. It is a lovely tin which I bought from a Jamie Oliver at home party a couple of years back, but Mary’s recipe states you need an 18cm tin, mine was about 21cm. This of course affected the amount of pastry I had to play with even though I stuck to the amount of 150g needed to keep back for the lattice top.  

When the pastry was put into the tin I noticed in a couple of places the pastry didn’t reach to the top of the tin.  The filling also didn’t come right to the top of the pastry case.  When it came to putting the lattice on the top, I found that the lattice strips just wouldn’t stretch enough, so I gave up after three attempts.  In the end, being as it’s nearly Halloween I decided to add some mini Halloween shapes from some tiny cutters I had bought last week.  These were quickly brushed with beaten egg and placed on top of the tart.

Once the tart was in the oven I started to get nervous again, what if it burned like last time? I hovered anxiously round by the cooker hoping and praying.

What’s more I didn’t have a soggy bottom this time, which was a first for me!

Would I bake it again? Oh yes, but I could do with learning how to adapt the quantities to fit my tin to save me going out to buy another.  However, the tart tasted fantastic according to everyone else and went down well at our family meal along with a chocolate hazelnut cake which my daughter had made.