Traditional Almond Slices

Although I´m not a huge nut fan, I do like almonds,especially when they are used in anything marzipan-y and as I had quite a lot of almonds left over after making my Christmas Cake, I decided to make these traditional British cakes to use them up. My Gran used to make them as a little girl and I loved 'em.

Almond Slices are very similar to Bakewell Tarts (another fav of mine and that I´ll also be having a bash at making in the future!) only Bakewell Tarts are topped with icing and Almond Slices are topped with almonds. I polished these off almost single-handedly and couldn´t get enough of them and they were fairly simple to make. Here´s the recipe I used, taken from The Dairy Book of Home Cookery and slightly modified:
Ingredients:

1 packet of Short Crust Pastry (you could use homemade pastry which would be even more delicious but to save time I used frozen ready-made)
2 tbsp good quality raspberry jam (I used Bonne Maman and used a bit extra as wanted it to be nice & jammy!)
100g caster sugar
100g icing sugar (sifted)
175g ground almonds
1 egg
1 egg white
1/2 tsp almond extract
blanched,split almonds to decorate

1.Preheat oven to 200ºC/400ºF
2.Grease a baking tray and roll out pastry to 25x15cm and line baking tray with pastry, pinching long edges of pastry up to form a border.
3. Spread jam over pastry base as shown:



4. Mix sugars and ground almonds together and add egg, egg white and almond extract, stirring to form an almond paste.
5. Spread almond paste evenly on top of jam:


6. Sprinkle split almonds on top to decorate:

7.Place in oven and bake for around 25 mins.

8. When golden brown on top, leave to cool. Then cut into 14 slices.

There you have it...exceedingly good cakes...they almost give Mr Kipling a run for his money! ; )