wee chocolate tarts

In the weekend we went to friend’s for dinner. I always like to take a little something with me as thank you. I have mentioned before that, seeing as I subscribe to 4 different cooking magazines, I make it a personal challenge to cook something from each of them once a week. By the time it got to the weekend I still hadn’t made a recipe from Cuisine, so it had to be something from there for my wee gift to take with us. I thought these little chocolate tarts looked like just the thing to take!

The tarts are very rich. The pastry is made with dutched cocoa which give a very strong chocolate flavour. The pastry was delicious eaten raw (I am one of those naughty people who prefers raw dough to cooked!!!). It was really forgiving and was easy to press into the tart tins. The other nice thing is that you chilled the tart pastry and then baked it, not having to worry about baking it blind. I used shallow tart tins my mother had bought for me a while back - they are quite hard to find these days, but you could use mini muffin tins.



The filling was a ganache using 72% chocolate, cream and a couple of teaspoons of espresso. The recipe also said to spread a thin layer of chocolate over the ganache – due to time constraints I skipped this step and merely dusted them with more dutched cocoa.

I really liked these tarts. They are just enough for two small mouthfuls, which due to the richness of the chocolate is probably all you need.