Chocolate Honey Tart

Chocolate Honey Tart

Another find from the April 2008 issue of Bon Appetit magazine. Why did I save 8 recipes from a magazine I don't like that much? For this one, I think it was the photo with the recipe, which looked nothing like my chocolate tart.

I had some technical issues making the crust. First, I used chocolate bunny grahams, suffering a stab of the creeps grinding up little bunnies in a food processor. They were too dense, I really needed real chocolate graham crackers. Next, I overbaked the crust so it came out too crunchy. Then I realized I'd omitted the honey -- hello, it's in the recipe name! -- from the crust. I attempted to compensate by drizzling some honey onto the crust afterward, but I can't say it added much.

I made the full recipe and split it across 4 mini-tart pans, simply because I didn't have a single full-size tart pan.

For chocolate, I used a mixture of 73% cocoa Dagoba chips (disks, really), and some Ghirardelli semisweet chips. I wanted a grownup chocolate, and one that wasn't too sweet, but in this form I think more semisweet and less 73% would have been called for.

It was time to learn how to make and drizzle icing from a baggie with its corner snipped off! I mixed some confectioner's sugar and half-and-half and a few drops of honey (gotta get it in somehow), put them into a ziploc bag, snipped off the corner, and drizzled away. This was fun, until I realized I should have sealed the bag when much of the icing oozed out the top onto my hand. But it got the point across.

A few raspberry sprinkles (from a sprinkle bottle misplaced in the baking chocolate aisle at Whole Foods -- which I took to be a sign from my cooking fairy godmother) made for a lovely presentation.

A photographer friend was visiting, so I used the opportunity to learn how to improve my food photography. He didn't have the right lens for this sort of close-up shot, but was able to get a nice one anyway with his fancy-schmancy SLR camera.

But even more telling is the shot he got with my so-not-fancy point-and-shoot.

Both taken in my dim dining room. The right camera and lighting would make a big difference, but the biggest difference is in the photographer.

I could probably improve the next tart with a better crust and slightly sweeter chocolate, but I can't say that heavy rich chocolate desserts are my favorite anyway. I like cakier things. I'm sold on the icing technique though!