Chocolate Truffle Tartlets–Baking with Julia

This weeks assignment was to bake Chocolate Truffle Tartlets from ‘the book.’ They sound amazing. A chocolate crust and a bittersweet chocolate filling studded with bits of ameretti cookies, milk and white chocolate pieces. How bad could it be? I made my dough on Sunday and the rest of the dessert on Monday so I could serve it on Monday evening to my bunco group. Instead of making several small tartlets, I made one big tart–I don’t own tartlet pans, and I don’t see myself making tartlets very often, so I didn’t buy any.

The recipe for the dough can be found on page 372, and the tart filling on page 382. none of it is particularly difficult, but there are several steps. I also made ‘chocolate waves’ (though they came out flat) and you can find the directions for that on page 450

I wanted to take pictures of making the dough, but I ended up completely covered in the cocoa and butter mixture, and even though its a waterproof camera, I decided not to.

I rolled out the dough using a technique that I learned in a one day cooking class at Peter Kump’s cooking school in NY a long time ago. you roll the dough between two pieces of saran wrap and then it NEVER sticks to the counter! yippee!

the technique worked perfectly. There is nothing I enjoy less than picking pieces of pie crust off my counter.

here’s the crust all baked and ready for the filling

it didn’t shrink, or fall down the sides (too much). I had some extra dough because I rolled it too big, so I just tapped it into the bottom of the crust. Waste not, want not, right?

Melting the butter and bittersweet chocolate was easy:

and even though I had it completely melted when I realized I’d never get the thing baked and out of the oven before picking up dorothy, it worked out fine. I popped it in the fridge and re-melted it when we got home.

those are the ‘chunks’ for the filling. I had never tasted an Ameretti cookie before. they’re pretty tasty.

and cute:

here it is, all baked up and ready for my friends to devour it!

This is what our plates looked like:

if you want to see other peoples tarts, go to the Tuesdays with Dorie page and check out all the beautiful tarts and tartlets. This recipe has several hosts Steph, Spike, Jaime, and Jessica

I’ve run 25 miles since my last post