chocolate mint tarts

chocolate mint tarts

27 Oct 2014

Do you ever have an idea that rattles around in your head for a very long time? I have a chalk board in my kitchen on which I write a list of things I'd like to bake. I wrote chocolate mint tarts on that chalk board about 12 months ago and at last I found the time to make them. I don't have an excuse, life just got in the way.



 I didn't have a recipe as such and decided to just wing it.



I knew I had some of my favourite chocolate pastry lurking in the freezer, made from the Popina Book of Baking. I used that to make the tart shells. The chocolate filling I adapted from this Valli Little recipe and I used some chocolate mints I've been hoarding in my pantry since last Christmas. I wasn't sure the chocolate mints would make the filling minty enough so I infused the milk with a peppermint teabag I found in the cupboard.



Here's the finished product. The recipe made eight 7 cm tarts and two 10 cm tarts. I took the tarts into work and they were pronounced a success by the team. The tarts are very rich and chocolately with a subtle but not over powering mint flavour.





Here's the recipe for you.

Chocolate Mint Tarts - makes eight 8 cm tarts or six 10 cm tarts

Chocolate Shortcrust Pastry 
(or you can use shop bought dark chocolate shortcrust pastry) 

225 g (8 oz) plain flour

25 gm (¼ cup) cocoa 

125 g (4½ oz) unsalted butter chilled and cubed 

85 g (3 oz) caster sugar

1 egg, beaten

Place the flour, cocoa, butter and sugar in a food processor and process until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. 

Gradually add the beaten egg until the dough starts to gather around the blade of the processor. Remove the dough and bring together into a ball. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 30 minutes. 

Roll the dough on a lightly floured surface until 3-4 mm thick. Line eight 8 cm or six 10 cm tart tins with the chocolate short crust pastry and trim the excess dough neatly around the edges. You won’t need all the pastry so freeze the leftovers for later use. Refrigerate the lined tins for another 20 minutes.

Preheat a conventional oven to 180˚C (350˚F) then prick the pastry with a fork to prevent rising. I line the tins with squares of baking paper before filling each tin with baking weights.  Place the tart tins onto a baking tray and bake for 10-15 minutes or until the edges of the pastry are browned. Carefully remove the lining paper and baking weights and allow the tart shells to cool before filling.

Filling

100ml milk

1 peppermint tea bag

225g good-quality dark chocolate, roughly chopped

2 eggs

1 tbl caster sugar

150ml thickened cream, plus extra whipped cream to serve (optional)

8-12 thin chocolate coated mints

Cocoa powder for dusting (optional)

Heat the milk in a saucepan over medium heat until just below boiling point. Steep the tea bag in the warm milk for 20 minutes to allow the flavour to infuse. Remove the tea bag from the milk, thoroughly squeezing the tea bag before discarding it but retain the milk.

Heat the oven to 160°C. Place chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of gently simmering water, not letting the bowl touch the water. Allow the chocolate to melt and then stir until smooth. Remove from heat and cool.

Gently whisk eggs and sugar in a separate bowl to just combine (don't allow the eggs to froth). Heat the cream and the infused milk in a saucepan over a medium heat until just below boiling point and then pour over the eggs, stirring. Return the egg mixture to the pan and stir for about 5 minutes over a low heat until thickened. Pour the mixture through a sieve over the bowl of chocolate, stirring gently until smooth.

Coarsely chop the mints and scatter 1 - 2 mints over the base of one of the cooled tart shells. Gently pour the chocolate mixture over the mints until the shell is almost full and level the surface, then bake the tarts in the pre-heated oven for 15 - 20 minutes or until just set. Leave the tarts in the switched-off oven for 30 minutes with the door closed. Remove and cool completely.

If desired, dust the tarts with cocoa powder and decorate with some mint flavoured chocolate cut outs and whipped cream before serving.

I had a busy weekend. Apart from baking, I collected the new side table you can see in the photos and did some more furniture shopping, this time looking for a lamp. I went out for dinner at the new bill's at Bondi. It was a gorgeous day on Sunday and the first weekend of Sculpture by the Sea so Bondi was buzzing.

I hope you all had lovely weekends. 

See you all again next week,

Jillian

Read more

chocolate pear and hazelnut tarts

chocolate pear and hazelnut tarts

5 May 2014

As expected, I ran out of time to bake and photograph something new for you this week. I shot this story last year for my Delicious Bites column for decor8 but in the end decided to use another recipe. I thought the recipe was too good to sit in my archives, so I'm sharing my chocolate pear and hazelnut tart recipe with you today.



As it's now autumn in Sydney the apricots, peaches, nectarines and cherries have disappeared from the fruit shop and have been replaced by apples, pears, oranges and quince, so this recipe is timely. I've not made this with plums but I think that combination would be fantastic.



I used my favourite Isidora Popovic chocolate pastry recipe and the filling is my own creation, a riff on the classic almond frangipane.  



I used my favourite little corella pears to make individual tarts. If you wanted to make a 23cm tart, the pastry makes sufficient to line a 23 cm tart tin. You'll need to make 3 times the quantity of the filling to fill the tart. 

Here's the recipe for you.

Chocolate Hazelnut Pear Tarts - makes 5 x 8cm tarts

Chocolate Shortcrust recipe

225g plain flour

25g cocoa powder

125g unsalted butter, chilled and cubed

85g caster sugar

1 egg

Filling

50 gm unsalted butter, softened

50 gm caster sugar

50 gm hazelnut or almond meal

2 tsp plain flour, sifted

3 tsp cocoa, sifted

30 g dark chocolate, melted and cooled

1 large egg

2 tsp rum or orange juice

Topping

3 corella pears, peeled and halved 

a few roughly chopped hazelnuts

apricot jam, warmed and sieved

Pastry

You’ll only need half the pastry quantity for this recipe. This keeps well, so you can freeze the remaining pastry. 

Place the flour, cocoa, butter and sugar in a food processor and mix until you get crumbs. Add the egg and mix again. Take the dough out of the mixer and bring together into a ball. Wrap in plastic wrap or kitchen paper and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

As this is a sticky dough, I rolled the dough out on lightly floured greaseproof paper until it was 3-4mm thick. Line the tart shells with the chocolate shortcrust pastry and trim the excess dough neatly around the edges. Refrigerate the tart shells for an hour. 

Filling

In a small bowl or in a food processor, combine all the filling ingredients and mix until a soft mixture is formed. Place in the fridge until required.

Method

Preheat the oven to 190°C.

Remove the tart shells from the fridge and line with baking paper. Fill the shells with baking beans or rice. Bake for 15 minutes before carefully removing the lining paper and the baking beans. Return the partly cooked shells to the oven and cook for another 10 minutes until the shells are dry and lightly coloured. Allow the tartlet shells to cool a little before filling.

Spoon the chocolate mixture into the pre baked tart shell. Don’t overfill the tarts ~ ⅔ is fine. Gently place the halved pears onto the filled tart, cut side facing up. Sprinkle the hazelnuts over the top of the tart, avoiding the pears.

Bake the tarts on the middle shelf for 30 minutes at 190°C or until the filling has puffed and tests a bit squidgy, like a brownie.

Remove the tart from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool. When cool, gently remove the tart from the tin. If desired you can glaze the top of the tarts with 1-2 tablespoons of warmed apricot jam.

This time next week I'll have just arrived in Amsterdam and I'll be struggling with jetlag. I'm aiming to post while on the road but don't know what I'll be posting or when, so see you all again sometime next week.

Bye for now,

Jillian

Read more

summer fruit and white chocolate muffins

summer fruit and white chocolate muffins

7 Oct 2013

Summer fruits are slowly making their way into the fruit shops in Sydney.



Strawberries are in season at the moment so I looked through my recipe books for an easy to make strawberry recipe. 



I found this recipe for summer fruit and white chocolate muffins in my Isidora Popovic book. Apart from strawberries, the recipe included raspberries, peaches, nectarines and white chocolate. Even though the price of a single peach at $8.99/kilo was a bit scary, I bought one anyway to make these.



I adapted this recipe a little. The original recipe made 6 large muffins but I made 12 small ones instead. Raspberries were used in the topping but they're very expensive at the moment so I used a few blueberries and instead of oil I used the same quantity of melted butter. 

The muffin batter was quite thick so I added a few tablespoons of milk to thin it out and at 25 minutes, my muffins were still uncooked. The little muffins took almost 40 minutes to bake in my slow old gas oven.
 



Here's the recipe for you.
Ingredients (makes 12 small or 6 large muffins)
2 medium eggs
80g caster sugar
50 g melted unsalted butter
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
2 tbs milk
1 large nectarine or peach, stoned and chopped
70g strawberries, hulled and quartered
70g good white chocolate, chopped

For the topping
30g nectarine or peach, stoned and chopped
12 blueberries or 30 g raspberries
30g strawberries, hulled and quartered
light brown soft sugar, for sprinkling 

Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Line a 12 hole muffin tray with liners.

Put the eggs, sugar, butter and vanilla in a mixing bowl and mix well. Mix the flour and baking powder together in a separate bowl, then combine with the wet ingredients. Add a little milk if the mixture seems too dry and don't worry if there are a few lumps in the batter. Stir in the nectarine slices, strawberries and white chocolate until evenly mixed.

Fill each muffin case about 2/3 full with batter. Scatter the fruit for the topping over the muffins and finish with a sprinkling of sugar. Bake in oven for about 25 minutes. When they are ready, the muffins should be well-risen and springy to the touch. They're best eaten warm from the oven.

I took the muffins into work and they were all eaten but whilst the flavours were great I wasn't happy with how they turned out. In the future, I'd use a different muffin recipe and I'm thinking I could tweak Ottolenghis' blueberry muffin recipe a little with great results.

I hope you all enjoyed your weekends. We had a long weekend in Sydney for Labor Day and apart from the baking you see here and much much more, I went into the city to see the Selling Dreams, 100 years of fashion photography exhibition at the State Library of NSW. Black and white photography always moves me.

I'll be back again next week.

Bye for now,

Jillian 

Read more

little chocolate pecan pies

little chocolate pecan pies

23 Sept 2013

I've been making some sort of version of this recipe for 20 years now and I haven't stopped tweaking it yet. Here's the latest version made with my favourite chocolate pastry recipe from Isidora Popovic's book, Popina Book of Baking. 



I had a little light corn syrup in the pantry but not quite enough and I could only find dark corn syrup at the shops so that's what I used. I've often made the filling with a combination of sugars but I've never used dark corn syrup before. I was curious to find out how it would affect the finished product.



Pecans are one of my favourite nuts and to bring out the flavour I always toast them in a moderate oven for about 10 minutes.



Now I don't normally blind bake pastry cases when making pecan pie but 2 of the pies suffered badly from soggy bottoms so I might think about doing so next time I make these.



Normally I glaze the pies with a kind of ganache but this time I just used melted chocolate. I'd love to claim it as my own idea, but I saw it in the Delicious Magazine 2013 Diary and thought what a good idea.



I met a friend for dinner last weekend and took along a few of the little pecan pies. I shared a few with my neighbours and took the rest into work.



Here's the recipe for you.
Chocolate Shortcrust Pastry
225 g (8 oz) plain flour
25 gm (¼ cup) cocoa
125 g (4½ oz) unsalted butter chilled and cubed
85 g (3 oz) caster sugar
1 egg, beaten

Place the flour, cocoa, butter and sugar in a food processor and process until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Gradually add the beaten egg until the dough starts to gather around the blade of the processor. Remove the dough and bring together into a ball. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 30 minutes. 

Roll the dough on a lightly floured surface until 3-4mm thick. Line 8 tart tins with the chocolate short crust pastry and trim the excess dough neatly around the edges. You won’t need all the pastry so freeze the leftovers for later use. Refrigerate the lined tins for another 20 minutes. 

If you want to blind bake the tart shells first to prevent them getting soggy bottoms, preheat the oven to 180˚C (350˚F) then prick the pastry with a fork to prevent rising. I line the tins with paper cup cake liners before filling each tin with baking weights.  Place the tart tins onto a baking tray and bake for 10-15 minutes or until the edges of the pastry are browned. Carefully remove the lining paper and baking weights and allow the tart shells to cool before filling.  

If you don't pre-bake the pastry, just follow the instructions below.   

Filling 

2 eggs 

⅔ cup sugar (I used a combination of light brown sugar and caster sugar)

1 tablespoons corn flour (optional) 

2 tablespoons melted butter 

1 teaspoon vanilla 

⅔ cup corn syrup (I used a combination of light and dark) 

1¼ cups toasted pecans, roughly chopped   

Preheat the oven to 180˚C (350˚F). Place the pecans over the base of the tart shells. Lightly beat the eggs with the sugars until combined. Add the melted butter, vanilla, the corn syrup and corn flour (if using) and mix until the mixture is well combined. Gently pour the filling over the pecans. The pecans will rise to the top.

Place the tins on a baking tray and place in the preheated oven. Bake the little pies for 45-55 minutes at 180˚C (350˚F ) until the tops are well browned and the filling is set. Remove the pies from the oven and cool on a wire rack.   

Topping 
55 g (2 oz) dark chocolate, roughly chopped

Place the chocolate in a small bowl over barely simmering water. Mix well until the chocolate has melted and the mixture is smooth. Remove the basin from the heat and drizzle the chocolate decoratively over the tops of the pies. You can use a teaspoon to do this or you can fill a small plastic bag with the chocolate and snip the corner off to make a piping bag. Allow the chocolate to set before serving.

The verdict? Absolutely scrumptious and when I was asked for the recipe, I knew I was on a winner.

I hope you enjoy them,

Jillian

Read more