Fruit and Nut Tart

Recently I made a fruit and nut tart. Effectively it was what you might call a 'fridge tart', using leftovers. The pastry was a pre-rolled supermarket product that I had in the freezer. The filling was some leftover fruit mince from Simon's Christmas mince pies, a bit of flour, the leftover soused fruit and nut mixture from some Italian biscuits I made earlier, and a couple of apples.

Homemade fruit and nut fridge tart.

The Italian biscuit recipe was from Ursula Ferrigno's Bringing Italy Home, but it will be one of the few recipes in this book that I won't be attempting again. Due to instructions that are not crystal clear and a poorly constructed recipe, I ended up using a just a fraction of the filling in the biscuits, and so had a jar full of expensive and delicious dried fruits and nuts soaked in liqueur that I thought I really ought to put to good use.

Initially I tried finding an alternative recipe for the biscuits, which are called rocciate. That was a fascinating exercise. Rocciate definitely exist as a traditional Italian cake. There's an Italian Wikipedia entry for them. But all the recipes are clearly Americanised versions of Ursula Ferrigno's British published metric recipe (to the point of being plagiarised except for the units of measurement). I thought it was telling that there is not a single photo of these biscuits accompanying any of the recipes. I reckon someone copied the recipe and it has subsequently been copied several more times. I strongly suspect that no one has actually made the recipe, despite it being posted on several recipe sites. Either that or they have made it and it was so unphotogenic and clearly wrong (the experience I had) they have not published the photos. But no one has commented on the recipes problems or edited it on any of these sites. Perhaps the recipe existed on other sites too, but they've been removed once it was established the recipe doesn't work. I don't know. And I don't know who is plagiarising who. And no, I didn't photograph my own weird lumpy leaking fruit and nut rolls (we ate them though).

Anyway, my flung together tart was quite good and an idea worth trying to replicate. The supermarket pastry let it down, but with good pastry, and maybe a glaze on the apple wedges, it would be perfect.