behomeforT: Dean's Chocolate Tart with Honeycomb

Mr BehomeforT’s favourite dessert is chocolate cake. Or chocolate ice cream. Or chocolate brownies. Or just chocolate. Really, anything with chocolate will do.

Every time we go out for dinner and there is a nice chocolate dessert on the menu, he’ll have it, and I am more than happy to share.

When I found this chocolate cake on Taste, I had to make it. Not only because it looked so good, but also because of its name. Mr BehomeforT is now not so anonymous anymore.... I’ll still call him Mr BehomeforT though.

Anyway, I made this tart especially for him, and he loved it. I loved it too! And although the recipe category seems to suggest that the difficulty level is ‘advanced’, I highly disagree. This cake was baked in no time, and it was gone in no time too.

Do you know someone named Dean? Make this chocolate tart for him! He’ll be very happy you did!

Ingredients

Filling

½ cup full fat milk

1 cup thickened cream

175g dark chocolate, broken (you can replace this with milk chocolate)

1 egg

30g caster sugar

Vanilla ice-cream and honeycomb, to serve

Pastry
150g unsalted butter, and extra butter to grease

80g caster sugar

1 egg yolk

1 1/3 cups plain flour, plus extra to dust

25 g almond meal

The recipe

First, make the pastry. Beat the butter and the sugar with electric beaters until thick and pale. Fold in the yolk, the flour and the almond meal. Make a ball out of the dough, dust it with flour, put it in a plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes. Grease a 25cm loose bottomed tart pan.

Dust a rolling pin and clean work surface with flour, and then roll out the pastry to 5mm thick. This is the most difficult part. The recipe says you have to loosely wrap the pastry around the rolling pin and until it over the prepared pan. However, this is quite difficult. The pastry will fall apart very easily.

I decided to roll out the dough on top of some aluminium foil, and then quickly turn the foil upside down above the greased tart pan. You will have to evenly distribute the dough into the sides and trim off any excess dough on some sides, which you can add to other sides of the pan where there is not enough dough. Put the tart in the freezer for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Line the pastry case with a crumpled sheet of baking paper and weigh it down with pastry weights. Blind bake for 20 minutes and then remove the weights and paper. Be careful, the weights will be hot! Return to the oven for 10 minutes or until the pastry is dry and golden. Leave to cool completely.

For the filling, heat the milk and cream in a pan over low heat and add the chocolate gradually. Make sure you keep on stirring the mixture.

Whisk together the egg and sugar. Slowly add the chocolate cream, stirring until shiny. Return mixture to a clean saucepan over low heat and cook, stirring, until it becomes the consistency of thick custard. When it coats the back of a wooden spoon and does not ‘leak’ it is finished. Allow to cool.

Reduce over to 160 degrees Celsius. Poor the cooled filling into the cooled pastry base. Bake for 20 minutes or until set but still soft and mousse-like in the centre. Chop the honeycomb and press it in the top of the tart while it is still warm. Serve the cake at room temperature with ice cream.

Review

This tart was very filling and gooey, and also very sweet. A small slice will do, and some vanilla ice on the side works really well. I will definitely make this tart again!