I made it a while ago and didn't have time to post it.
Since Febuary this year, we have been talking to the builder, the draftman and the pool builders, and kitchen makers to negotiate our home renovation. Although cooking is stress relief for me, sometimes, I just didn't have the energy any more after going around and look at different colours of paint, designs and spending whole afternoon in the hardware stores.
In a couple of week's time, I will be living without my kitchen, new one will be in, but old will be out. We are in the mode of packing, reducing pantries and fridge items, and all of the renovation dos and don'ts.
I haven't put this tart on the blog before, it was a bit of reminder of our wedding cake, a big chocolate mud cake with profiteroles filled with chocolate creme pattiserie and lots of chocolate curls.
A dark chocolate tart based on this recipe from Epicurious Website:
Chocolate Glazed Chocolate Tart
The only thing I did different was using Arnott's Chocolate Ripple Biscuit instead of chocolate graham crackers (I'm not sure if I can find it here).
Added profiteroles filled with vanilla creme pattiserie and drizzled with spun sugar, caramel to stick the profiteroles together.
Voila....
This were made last weekend? I bought some strawberries from the sales rack, not the best quality, but it's so nice on desserts, and I've promised the children something chocolate. I was playing around with a couple of things, and as usual, chucking in bits and pieces from the pantry, and I got this:
Chocolate Walnut Cake with Strawberry Butterscotch Sauce
Cake:
150g SR flour
1 tsp baking powder
100g walnut (lightly toasted in pan and grounded)
50g ground almond
50g butter
100g olive oil
100g white sugar
100g brown sugar
100ml cream
50ml milk (extra if needed)
2 whole eggs - Beaten
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp all spice
100g dark chocolate
50g cocoa
Strawberry Sauce:
80g cream
50g butter
150g strawberry
1 tsp cream sherry
Juice from Half of a Lemon
50ml water
150g white sugar
Method:
For the Cake:
1. Heat up the cream to just boil with butter and pour over broken dark chocolate piece and white sugar, stir till smooth.
2. Wait until cool a bit, add in brown sugar and eggs and mix well.
3. Sift in flour, and spice mix together and mix well till smooth, mix in the nuts.
4. Add in milk and stir through to check consistency, add a bit more if needed to be.
5. Pre-heat oven to 190C and line and grease a 20cm cake tin.
6. Bake for 1 hour and check if skewer is clean when stick in.
For the Syrup:
1. Make sugar syrup with water and white sugar.
2. Add Strawberry and cook till liquid is pink. Add Lemon juice
3. Add sherry.
4. Take strawberry out, add butter, stir through till mix well.
5. Add cream and cook till creamy and mix through.
To serve: Add sugar strawberry on top of cake and pour sauce around cake.
The other "small cake" I made for the Christmas Party at Monique's Kinder, and was quite well received...
The recipe I used was from Cuisine Magazine, a recipe by Natalia Schamroth - a famous New Zealand Food Writer and Stylist (I'm not sure if she's a chef).
The original recipe is for Éclairs and is good for making 10 Éclairs, as I would like to make them fit into the normal cup cake case and fit into my round cake tin to bring to the kinder, I made them into relatively big profiterole buns, big enough for a lot of yummy Chocolate Crème Pâtissière filling.
Please refer to the Cuisine Website for the Original Recipe, and I can only assure you that I've used this recipe twice to different crowds, I get good reaction both times.
The only alteration I made was the liquid in the choux pastry. I normally use half milk half water in all my choux doughs, so I replaced 1 cup water with 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup full cream milk, the pastry shell will be softer with half milk version rather than just water.
This is what the choux looked like after adding all the eggs:
The profiterole buns out of the oven:
Filled (I usually use the small metal nosal to poke a hole on the side and pipe the Chocolate Crème Pâtissière filling), and topped with chocolate sauce, three times as heavy and ready for the party....
