Chocolate-Glazed Chocolate Tart

Apologies again for yet another delay in my posting.  I have just gone through the rather arduous process of moving house, so things were a little hectic recently.  Still, I haven't forgotten about my love of baking, and I have a particularly lovely and delicious recipe to discuss here.

I actually came across this recipe on BuzzFeed when I read the article "71 Reasons Candy Hearts Are Stupid".  Several of the delicious-looking desserts called out to me, and I finally picked this chocolate tart to have a go at making.

Now the recipe calls for the use of something called 'graham crackers' for the tart base.  I believe that these are an American biscuit, so as they are not readily available in the UK I substituted them with good old Bourbon biscuits.  This had worked nicely in the American pies I'd previously made, so I thought they'd be just the thing.

As ever, I had a great deal of fun bashing the biscuits into tiny pieces:

So many crushed biscuits!

After these were combined with the sugar and the butter, they were then pressed into the tart tin, and then baked in the oven.  I'd never baked this type of tart base before (previously I'd left it to set in the fridge), so I was interested to see how it would turn out.  My main worry was it collapsing in the oven, or when it was taken out of the tin.  However, aside from a little bit of the butter seeping out of the base and the tin, it turned out quite nicely:

Baked biscuit base.

So then came time to make the filling.  A two-stage process, I was concerned about getting the texture of the truffle-like filling right.  Luckily, the process of the truffle filling was not too dissimilar to the custard tart filling I've made before, although obviously this one had the addition of some rather lovely chocolate.  This was then very carefully baked in the oven until it was just set:

Truffle-y goodness.

The only (very small) issue I came across here was the emergence of a few bubbles on the top of the filling.  I simply popped them, and hoped that they would be adequately covered by the chocolate glaze that I would make next.

So after a suitable cooling period, it was then onto making the chocolate glaze to go on top of the filling.  I'd had a go at making a chocolate ganache before, and it had not worked out well at all, but I was determined to have another go.  Obviously the recipe calls for the use of corn syrup, which is again not widely available here in the UK.  Therefore I used golden syrup instead.  This seemed to work incredibly well, and did not affect the flavour of the glaze at all.  The glaze appeared to have the perfect texture once everything had been stirred together, so I bit the bullet and poured it on top of the tart filling.

A rather nice chocolate glaze on top.

Well, it looked rather good to me, and it also covered up the air bubble holes very nice and quite evenly as well.  Yes, there were a couple of wobbles in it, but as a whole I was quite pleased with the results.  I then left the glaze for about an hour to set (sat on the counter top, not in the fridge, which is very important to know).  Once everything had set, the final result was rather pleasing.

The finished tart!

Not only did the tart come out of the tin nicely (the tart crust held perfectly), but it also cut beautifully as well.  The tart held it's structure perfectly, and looked incredible when slices were cut out.

Yum!

This proved to be one of my most popular recipes yet.  The tart filling was not too sweet, and had a rich, luxurious flavour that was an absolute delight to eat.  One thing I will mention, the glaze soon loses its glossiness if the tart is put in the fridge, so be prepared for this is you have to store it in the fridge for some reason.  If this is the case, I have found that the gloss can be brought back if you very carefully heat the glaze by using a hairdryer on a low setting (yet another trick seen on The Great British Bake Off).

I can definitely recommend this recipe - it is a fantastic tart, and well worth making, particularly for a special occasion (although I'll make it anytime).

Beckie.