Recipe Road Test: Chocolate-Caramel Macadamia Nut Tart

A decadent chocolate-caramel dessert for impressing guests

As a I cook I’m usually drawn to the simple and I rarely make something that requires multiple steps. So this tart was a departure for me, since it involved blind-baking pastry, making caramel, making chocolate ganache, assembling it all before the chocolate and caramel set, and piping chocolate squiggles on top, before baking it again. It was all done from scratch – and all of this on Christmas Day last year when I was making about five savoury dishes as well! Surprisingly it all went well and it was actually a lot of fun.

Recipe – Chocolate-Caramel Macadamia Nut Tart

The recipe for chocolate-caramel macadamia nut tart is from the December 2009 issue of Bon Appetit. (Since the recipe is available on Epicurious.com and I have not altered it, I have provided a link rather than replicating all the instructions here).

I chose it because it looked visually impressive, appealed to my love of chocolate, and I thought the nuts provided a nice touch of home (macadamia is native to Australia). I previously had great success with another Bon Appetit baking recipe – the top-crust peach and cardamom pie, which I have made several times and also reworked as a cinnamon version.

My Road Test

A note on ingredients: I bought good quality chocolate, though I can’t recall the brand. The recipe specified toasted macadamia nuts but I don’t think mine were.

Method: Parts of this recipe can be done ahead. After my experience cooking Thanksgiving dinner, I certainly had good intentions about getting organised. I did do some food preparation the day before but inevitably, I ran short of time. The pie came together on the day.

The crust was easy. I simply followed the instructions and blended the flour, sugar, salt, butter and water in the food processor. This type of crust has a cookie-like consistency and rather than rolling it with a rolling pin, you press the pastry into the baking tin (I used a spring-form cake tin). I found this worked really well.

Assembled pie before piping and baking

I’d never done blind baking before but it wasn’t that hard. It basically means that you pre-bake the pastry since it won’t cook much once the filling is inside. The recipe calls for foil but I may have used baking paper instead. I then covered the crust with ceramic baking beans – I’d bought a tub for £5 a year or two ago but never previously used them. The weight of the baking beans is meant to prevent pastry shrinking and apparently you can use real dried beans instead.

The chocolate ganache and caramel both went exactly according to recipe. The only challenge was that I had to work quickly so that the caramel and chocolate didn’t cool before I had assembled the pie. That’s why there are no pictures of this stage.

I don’t have a proper piping bag so I made one by forming a cone with baking paper and then snipping the point. It worked pretty well. I had never really done this before, so my control was not perfect but I think I did a reasonable job.

Result: The pie turned out very nicely, though it was extremely rich.

Verdict

The tart was over the top – like a homemade Mars bar with nuts! I served with whipped cream and vanilla ice cream, which helped cut the heavy caramel, but it was still an extremely rich and heavy dessert. I’m sure I would have appreciated it more if I hadn’t just had an enormous Christmas dinner – and I did enjoy the leftovers quite a bit, as did my friends.

It’s certainly an impressive-looking dessert but I would not make this exact recipe again, mainly because I found it too heavy on the caramel. The caramel layer was roughly twice as big as the chocolate layer and I could barely taste the chocolate! I would adapt the quantities so that there were even amounts of chocolate and caramel – or even reverse the ratio to have more chocolate than caramel. I think a modified version would be wonderful – but for caramel fiends, maybe it’s perfect just the way it is!

The macadamias were great but I think hazelnuts would be lovely as well if you want to mix it up a bit.

By the way, I am not thrilled with the photos since it was dark and I had to resort to the flash. Now I have a new digital camera, I think my food photos should be a lot better.

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