I am of the make-your-own-pastry-tribe but if you’re not and would like to make the tart you could always seek out a good ready-made pastry. When a recipe calls for a pastry shell to be baked blind, I adopt a twenty-four hour approach to tackling it; I make the pastry and bake the shell the evening before it’s needed and then all I have to do the following day is make the filling and cook off the tart. This is a Simon Hopkinson recipe, I suspect everybody is probably into Simon Hopkinson’s latest book, The Good Cook, post his recent BBC series, but the chocolate tart recipe is from his older and excellent book Roast Chicken and Other Stories published by Ebury Press in 1994.
INGREDIENTS
For the pastry
175g butter
65g icing sugar
2 egg yolks
225g plain flour
For the filling
3 egg yolks
2 whole eggs
40g caster sugar
150g butter
200g dark chocolate broken into pieces (I used one with a 70% cocoa content)
METHOD
To make the pastry, put the butter, sugar and egg yolks in a bowl (or food processor) and work together quickly. Blend in the flour, and work to a homogenous paste. Chill for at least one hour.
Preheat the oven to 180°C . Roll out the pasty as thinly as you can and use it to line a 20.5cm tart tin. Bake blind in the oven for about 25 minutes or until pale biscuit in colour, but thoroughly cooked through. Remove. Increase the heat of the oven to 190°C.
To make the filling, put the egg yolks, whole eggs and sugar in a bowl and beat vigorously together, preferably with an electric mixer until really thick and fluffy. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water, stirring until smooth. Pour on to the egg mixture while just warm. Briefly beat together until well amalgamated, them pour into the pastry case. Return to the hot oven for 5 minutes, then remove and leave to cool. Serve with thick cream.
Enjoy!
Note: To bake the pastry case blind I lined it with tin foil and weighed it down with uncooked rice.
Just Add Attitude 