"The word “tart” gets people excited – that buttery luscious bottom and crunchy texture on top – add the ease of supermarket pastry and fresh seasonal fruit – you will want to do this for your next dinner party – would work as well with apple or pear and even fresh figs"

Ingredients

1 large square sheet sweet short pastry (from frozen section of supermarket)

1 egg, beaten

1 kg feijoas peeled and sliced

100g hard salted butter

160g self-raising flour

A generous punch of ground ginger

50g castor sugar

Extra butter (optional)

Method

Preheat the oven to 165degC fan bake.

Roll out the commercial pastry – working quickly and line one well greased 23-26cm flan ring with the pastry. Cover with plastic wrap and place in fridge for at least 10 minutes. Resting pastry in the fridge prior to baking is important – better results and less shrinkage.

Take from fridge and line base with baking paper or greaseproof paper.  Fill with rice or “baking beans” to weigh down the pastry while pre-baking. This is called baking blind – place in oven for a good 10 minutes – less for smaller tarts.

Take out from oven remove beans and brush the hot pastry base with beaten egg.

Place back in oven to seal tart shell – 3-4 minutes for larger flan – a good minute for the smaller tarts.

Place sliced feijoa into tart.

In the food processor pulse the butter, flour, ginger and sugar until it resembles coarse ground almonds.

Sprinkle this all over the tart and fill in gaps as well. Dot very lightly with a little extra butter. This is not necessary but adds extra colour to the topping.

Bake 165degC fan bake for at least 35 minutes or until crumble is golden and fruit is slightly bubbling through.

Cooks Tips

* You want some colour to the topping – the golden/slightly light brown – like shortbread indicates great flavour.  You can make them to just short of that colour and then re-heat to get that colour and serve.

*If you love ginger PLEASE add some finely diced crystallized ginger to the feijoa – but not too much or it will dominate the great natural feijoa flavour.

* We used four individual 8cm tartlets pans and made individual tarts for easy handling and portion control.  They were baked at 165degC fan bake for 17 – 20 minutes.