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....
I'm not in favour of cooking or baking in hot days, for some reason, maybe I'm getting too old, I don't survive well in the kitchen when it's over 30C.
So there was a quite a bit of hesitation when the team decided on a morning tea today, for Chinese New Year....
Was hot last night, so I decided on something simple and easy, and doesn't require baking...
Tart Shell:
250g chocolate ripple biscuit (or any chocolate cookies)
120g butter.
Fillings:
4 egg yolks
70g dark chocolate
100g milk chocolate
6 table spoons of sugar
3 tea spoons of gelatine
3 table spoons of boiling water
2 teaspoon of good instant espresso coffee
1 table spoon Kahlua
It's easy, melt the butter, crush the biscuits, press and fill up the sides and bottom of a lined 20cms springform pan.
The filling, there was a mistake, not fatal, but I meant to make bavarois like this one, but with an espresso twist, however, I forgot about the cream (even though I had it in the fridge!) and I can't really call it bavarois...
The verdict, it's a much more dense cake than the Joconde Imprime I made with the proper bavarois.... but it's easier to set in a tart shell.
It's a very easy tart, very minimal amount of cooking needed, although it needed to be made at least 2-3 hours ahead, still... great for summer hot days when you don't want to stay in the kitchen.
November's Daring Baker challenge is fun, it's crostatas... Italian tarts. Pasta frolla and hmm whatever topping you fancy!
I actually made 2 crostatas, Crostata di Ricotta, Ricotta tarte, and Crostata di Mele, Classic Apple tarte. I love making tarts and the pasta frolla dough is lovely, pastry is short, sweet and yummy.
I'm posting the Crostata di Ricotta first as this is the one featured in the Daring Kitchen page.
Thanks Simona from Briciole for this wonderful challenge, and the wonderful crostata recipes!
My yummy Crostata di Ricotta:
Pastry – Pasta Frolla:
200g plain flour (or 150g plain flour 50g almond meal)
100g cold butter diced
1 tbsp orange zest
1 egg, separated
70g castor sugar
1 pinch of salt
Fillings:
100g pitted dates, diced
40g candied peels, diced
50ml masala
375g ricotta cheese
1 tsp vanilla extract
250g mascarpone cheese or any cream cheese
110g castor sugar
100g toasted almond (or any walnut, hazelnut etc)
3 eggs
Method:
Use food processor, pulse to break down butter mix till it resembles bread crumbs.
Gently work the flour mixture to form a dough, don’t over work dough, wrap in cling wrap and put in fridge to rest for an hour.
Meanwhile, put chopped dates and peels in masala to soak for half an hour.
Whisk eggs and sugar, add in ricotta, cream mascarpone till smooth.
Fold in the fruits and almond.
Roll out pastry in 2 layers of plastic. Gently transform to a loose bottom tarte tin. Wrap the excess pastry in glad wrap and put in fridge.
Blind bake tarte shell with rice weight in 200C oven for 10 minutes. Cool.
Fill up with the filling, make stripes to go across, and bake in 180C oven for 40-45 minutes.
I did use the reduced fat cheeses for healthy reasons....
Crostata to be served warm...
My family love Cantonese Egg Tarts when we go out for yumcha. There are 2 version of the Dan (egg) Tarts, the cookie base and the puff pastry base, the ones normally seen in yumcha, are the puff pastry version and the cookie base ones are usually seen in the Hong Kong style bakeries...
I have made them a couple of times, as it's so much cheaper to make them - and it's not hard at all, but I've only ever made the cookie base ones - they are a lot easier.
So this weekend, I thought, well, let's do it properly. The puff pastry ones.... of course, the short cut will be using the frozen puff pastry as you don't really need it to be too puffy anyway, the shop bought frozen puff pastry will work for this recipe. However, it's not fun isn't it?
It's a different puff pastry compared to the traditional French style puff pastry, mainly because of the fats, traditionally, the pastry calls for lard instead of butter, as butter was not so common in China in the old days.
In my adapted version however, I did use butter instead of lard, although the other alternative can be margarine.
Fat dough:
75g plain flour
100g lard/butter
Rub softened butter into flour and cover with cling film, put back in fridge for 15 minutes.
Water Dough:
75g plain flour
20g egg yolk (1 egg yolk) - lightly whisked
30g ice water
Make a well with flour, and add egg yolk and water in the middle, made a rough dough.
Fillings:
40g white sugar
140g water
2 large eggs
20ml full cream milk
20ml cream
Boil water with sugar, till all melted and keep aside till cool.
Whisk egg, add in milk and cream and mix well.
Add in boiled sugar water, mix well, and sift mixture through fine sift - to make sure the custard will be smooth and silky.
To make pastry:
Roll out water dough to a square.
Roll out fat dough to a smaller square and put in middle of the water dough as a diamond shape.
Fold over the 4 edges of the water dough to cover the fat dough.
Fold up like letter, covering the edges, into 3 folds, and then roll out to half an inch of thickness.
Fold into letter shape - 3 folds again and then put in fridge for 20-30 minutes to chill (a warm dough is very hard to work with and will easy break, a bit of flour can be added to the working bench)
Repeat the process for 3-4 times, each time, the dough needs to be back in the fridge to chill and set.
Roll out the pastry as thin as you can, around 1-2mm thickness, and use a round shape cookie cutter to cut out the round circle to set into the lined mould. I use patty pans as lining, and usually use 2 cases. You can buy those Dan Tart moulds in Asian grocery shops specialised in Cantonese food, or just use muffin tray. If you use muffin tray, use cup cake cases instead of patty pans, as Dan Tart moulds are smaller.
Press a bit of holes on the bottom of the tart shells using fork.
The egg tart shells don't need to be blind baked, so just fill in the custard fillings, to around 80% full.
Pre-heat oven to 200C or 185C fan forced, and bake for 15 minutes in the middle layer of oven, and then lower the temperature to 180C or 165C fan forced, for a further 5-10 minutes till ready.
Cool to serve.
This will make about 15, but will be around 8-10 if using muffin tray.
Saturday night I made my first creme brulee tarte, because I finally bought a blow torch... Well, it's not really that hard as I have made a lot of custard tartes before, the only thing left to be done is the caramelising of the sugar on top...
I followed Michael McCarty's recipe and this tarte is just beautiful.... Must say it is a big tarte, so we had half for dessert after Saturday dinner and the other half, for dessert after Sunday lunch... even the children loved it... This is the link to the recipe http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Creme-Brulee-Tart-350238
I made the creme brulee tarte because I wanted to make Macarons.... so I did it today. Egg whites were seperated 3 days ago, as instructed by Emmanuel Mollois...
Quantity wise, I actually used another recipe, because Emmanuel's recipe contains a lot of eggs, sugar, and I thought, there's no way, I can use up all that biscuits, where can I find an oven big enough to bake all these and I wasn't wrong... Even with that recipe, I think it's better for me to half it, because I found out quick enough, I don't have enough cookie sheets and silicon matts to bake all the biscuits, and if they are not on the right surface, they become sticky and I lost some of the biscuits because of that!
275 grams pure icing sugar
140 grams fine almond meals
4 egg whites
25 grams dutched cocoa powder
and everything is sifted and sifted.... I whisked the egg whites to hard peak, fold in half of the icing sugar and whisk as I would do a French Menringue (of course I did use an electrical mixer, I can whisk by hand, but I think the machine can whisk it a bit firmer...) and then fold in the rest of sugar and cocoa powder and the almond meals.
and Then, I had trouble, we bought that big cupboard thingy for the kitchen and hubby was busy moving things in the kitchen whilst I was stressing out with the macarons... and I was never good with piping... The first bag busted, and then the second... finally got it lucky but after scrapping the batter from one bag to another, I did lose some air bubbles and the biscuits were a bit flatter than I thought it should be....
This is what they look like after 23 minutes in the 140C oven, I do think they could go for 2 or three more minutes, I used Emmanuel's instruction, but he must have got a much better oven than my old 70's very tired oven.
But, it's already exciting enough, after all that, I managed to get 10 reasonable looking macarons, which I only just made a simple ganache for the filling....
100g lindt's 70's cocoa chocolate
100g thickened cream
2 tbsp icing sugar
25g butter
Heat up cream and pour over chocolate (broken down to pieces) and stir to melt the chocolate. add in butter and make sure everything is smooth... add icing sugar, and mix well.
Make sure ganache is cooled down and not runny before you assemble....
I've heard that Macarons are best after chilled in freezer...
Surely they don't look too bad for a first timer? The family did ate the ones that didn't look too good, half stuck ones or the ones piped too close and stuck together, those factory seconds, and they thought the biscuits by itself were yummy enough...
