Tart.

I ate a tawdry lunch of three readymade grilled-from-frozen hash browns with various dips; homemade pesto, some supermarket humous which Mike had left at our house, some Dutch garlic mayonnaise and an oversized slick of sweet chilli sauce. This left me hankering for more food and so I got worked up. I tried to go swimming at my local baths but instead stopped and drooled with my eyes at the cakes at the local deli-cafe. I was determined not to buy a piece, but to make something of my own. So I did, and here is the first proper recipe of this blog (almost).

CHOCOLATE NUT TART

pastry:
6 oz plain white flour
3 oz butter / shortening
1 oz caster sugar
1 medium sized egg
flour for dusting

filling:
7oz of nuts / finely ground nuts e.g. almonds
2 or 3 oz sugar (rats! the only ingredient the quantity of which I did not note!)
2 medium sized eggs, beaten
3 heaped tablespoons cocoa powder, sieved
1 teaspoon good vanilla essence
2 tablespoons of butter / shortening
drop of milk (optional)
nut pieces, skins removed (optional)

1. Preheat oven to gas mark 4
2. Make pastry: rub sieved flour into fat, then add sugar. Beat the egg and then add to the mixture. Use your hands to bind into a dough, handling as little as possible. If the egg is not enough to bind it, add a teaspoon of cold water. Refrigerate the dough for half an hour, or ten minutes in the freezer.
3. Meanwhile, make the filling: if the the nuts are whole use a food processor to grind them down into a flour. Add the sugar, the fat, two eggs, cocoa powder and vanilla essence. The mixture should be a bit like a cake mix- dropping consistency- but look grainy rather than smooth. Add a splash of milk if the mix is too thick.
4. Remove pastry dough from fridge / freezer and roll out until about one eighth inch thick. I used this to line two 6-inch flan dishes, but one ten inch dish may suffice. Fill cases with mixture - here you can press nut halves into the mix if you wish-and bake for 40-45 minutes.

Serve warm with cream.

I'm sure you will have seen similar recipes. I am proud of this because I consulted no recipe book. However, I have discovered writing recipes which other people can follow requires care. Care which I am not sure I have the patience for.

Notes: I used a mixture of ground almonds and whizzed up some "chopped mixed nuts" I found in my cupboard which was mainly peanut I think. Walnut would give an exciting taste I reckon. Almond is a classic though. So is hazelnut. This was the first sweet pastry using an egg I had ever made.

Verdict: The pastry was not as soft as I thought it might be, perhaps more egg next time? But it was subtly sweet and this was good. The nut mixture worked very well. I didn't have any chocolate, so if I made it again, I might use that instead of cocoa.

I confess that I had an excess of pastry dough. I rolled it out into a thick circle, then placed a mix finely chopped hazelnuts (done in food processor) and soft dark brown sugar in the centre. I enclosed the nut and sugar mix with the dough and worked it in until it spread consistently into the dough. And I was left with cookie dough. I rolled them out and baked for 18-20 minutes and was left with some lovely hard little biscuits. The kind you might serve in a saucer at the side of a cup of coffee. Yum.

Hugh F-W is useful for some things

...I suppose, like inspiring me to make this Roast Beetroot and Goat's Cheese tart.



He had a recipe in the Guardian Saturday magazine a few weeks back, but I no longer had and it did not occur to me that I could look on the internet. Which was a good; I like just being inspired by recipes and then going off and doing my own thing. It was similar, although looking at the recipe now, I omitted the red wine, the dill and the honey. I probably would have used garlic, had it been in the house, but I was forced to go without, which was fine. Garlic is so easy to overuse because it has a consistent and popular flavour. But sometimes you have to just let go and let other ingredients speak for themselves. Which they did, in volumes. Roasted beetroot is so good. Perhaps my favourite thing about beetroot apart from the colour is the stripes which you see in its flesh when you cut it into blocks.

I had bought a bunch of beetroot complete with long stalks and leaves. I finely chopped the stalks, added a finely cubed apple, red wine vinegar, salt, pepper and a dash of elderflower cordial. Which provided the salad that you see here with the tart:



I still have the leaves left. They may be too tough to eat raw, so I will either wilt them or chop them up and add them to a curry. In which case I will have to go out and get some garlic.