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.

Sweet Delights

Rather than do one post per smaller bake, I thought it best to do one post dealing with a group of them. This post is looking at the sweet-based bakes I've been experimenting with.

First up is honeycomb (also called hokey pokey). I've always loved honeycomb (Crunchie bars!), so have always loved the idea of making my own. I used this recipe by the amazing Lorraine Pascale from, you've guessed it, the BBC Food website. Most recipes just use sugar and golden syrup, but I was intrigued by this recipe as it called for the addition on butter. The part of this that is the most fun is of course stirring in the bicarbonate of soda - a veritable explosion of sugar occurs.

Honeycomb.

Despite following the recipe to the letter, sometimes this just doesn't work exactly as planned. However, whilst the honeycomb may be a little flat, the butter added earlier means that the flavour is incredible. The honeycomb has a wonderful snap to it to accompany the rich, syrupy flavour.

Next in the agenda was more sugar work, and an attempt at one of my favourite pieces of confectionary - peanut brittle. I found this recipe on Nigella Lawson's website, and felt that it looked easy enough. I knew that the trickiest bit was going to be melting the sugar, and sure enough the very first batch was burnt beyond all salvation. The problem was I did not have a wide enough pan for the amount of sugar the recipe suggested. Therefore, I reduced the recipe amounts, and heated a thinner layer of sugar in the pan. This seemed to work nicely, and the sugar easily caramelised into the mahogany-coloured liquid the recipe described. This time I stirred the peanuts into the sugar in the pan, and then poured (or rather scraped) the mixture into a baking-paper lined tray. Again, I learnt from this - the next time I made a batch of the brittle, I poured out a layer of the caramel, waited for it to cool, and then sprinkled the peanuts on top. I then melted some more sugar, and poured out another layer of caramel, this time directly on top of the peanuts. I found this to be a much easier way of making the brittle, though I'm sure others would disagree.

Great big tray of peanut brittle.

Bite-size chunks.

Next up were simple hard-boiled sweets. I found this recipe online, which seemed simple enough for a novice like me. Again, the main issues I had here were with melting the sugar. Trying to get the sugar and golden syrup to the right crack stage without a sugar thermometer proved to be a bit hit-and-miss, so there were times when the sweets were soft and chewy (and could pull out teeth if you weren't careful). However, I eventually bought myself a sugar thermometer and some really great silicon sweet moulds, and I was in my way to being more successful with the sweets. One of the great things about this recipe is that you don't taste the golden syrup, no matter what flavouring you add. I have made these sweets in mint, orange, lemon, and maple syrup flavours. They were all delicious, and went down very well with my friends.

Minty goodness.

A more recent attempt of mine was an old favourite. I have long had a love of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and one day I decided to have a go at making them myself. One of my best friends, M, was coming over for dinner, so I decided that was as good a day as any to have a go at making my own peanut butter cups. For this, I didn't follow any recipe, just my own instincts. What I did was first melt a blend of milk and dark chocolate, and then pour a thin layer of the chocolate in the base of cupcake cases. These were then put aside to cool completely. Once they had cooled, I placed a teaspoonful of peanut butter onto the chocolate base, and then spread it out almost to the edges of the case. Once the peanut butter was in place, I simply poured more melted chocolate over the peanut butter until it was completely covered, ensuring that the layer of chocolate was fairly thin on the top as well as the bottom. When the Peanut Butter Cups had set, M and I jumped on them, eating most of them in one sitting. M even demanded the recipe off me, which I definitely see as a success.

My own version of Peanut Butter Cups.

Finally in this post is a recipe that was in the Radio Times one week, related to the The Great Comic Relief Bake Off. These 'Honeycomb Crunchies' made use of a lot of ingredients I already had in, including some honeycomb is made weeks before. This also meant that the recipe took less time than usual, as I didn't have to make the honeycomb from scratch. These bites were delicious, the richness of the melted butter, golden syrup and chocolate blending perfectly with the crispy honeycomb and the digestive biscuits. In the future, I may even add some glacé cherries, making something akin to a Rocky Road, but without the marshmallow. L took a tub of these into her Physics Department, and they apparently disappeared within seconds - there were obviously some very hungry physicists around that day.

Honeycomb Crunchies.

Beckie.