I have to say...this ended up looking EXACTLY like the photo...although I didn't bother with the fru-fru nougatine embellishment.
Now, I DID NOT use the attached recipe. I made it from his book "Tart it Up" by Eric Lanlard (Cake Boy) and picked this tart because I wanted to get rid of a 3.5 oz bar of Godiva Salted Caramel Chocolate that I opened and promptly despised. Honestly, I'm praying nightly for that whole salty/sweet trend to die a terrible death soon. Sooner than soon.
Also, I wanted to try his chocolate tart crust.
Anyway, back to the tart....I had Cake Boy's book from the library and am here to say that while I loved many of his ideas, I HATED the font size and how the ingredient amounts were specified. (insert conditional statement: this is my OLD EYES bi+ching.)
I made THREE, count 'em...THREE mistakes based on not reading the text correctly...AND I WAS WEARING MY READING GLASSES!
Annoyances: Mr. Cake Boy is British and this book is...well, I'm not sure what nationality. If you'll look at the attached recipe, it's written using British ingredients/terms and provides weights. The book, however, is written in American measurement (cups) and provides NO weights! Apparently, his publishers believes that lazy American cookbook buyers are incapable of using a scale.
(Boy, I'm crankier than I realized about this, considering the dish turned out well.)
So...I know he's British and he's specifying "light cream"....what does that mean to me, sitting here in mid-rural America? After scanning a few Internet searches that failed to compare British creams to American creams, I used a 50:50 ratio of half/half and heavy cream because that's what I had.
In the chocolate tart base, he calls out cocoa. Okay, he's British, so does that mean Dutch process cocoa? Hell if I know. Again, I ended up using what I had, which was half Droste and half Hershey's, straddling, as it were, the Hadrian Wall of Cocoa.
And this is where I made Measuring Mistake #1: I misread 1/4 C of cocoa as 3/4 C (explaining why I had to dip into both stashes of cocoa). That meant 5 minutes of carefully removing excess cocoa because I had ALSO missed the extra 2 TBL of flour (Mistake #2) and dumped it on top of the cocoa.
He also added an extra TBL of powdered sugar which I missed with the 1/3 C and OH FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, WHY DIDN'T HE JUST GIVE US THE DAMN WEIGHTS!
He didn't specify egg size, so I used Jumbo, not caring anymore.
He didn't specify what percentage of chocolate (just "dark") so I used the Godiva bar and a Godiva white chocolate coconut to go with the whole West Indies spice thing. Then I realized that might turn out sweeter than I wanted so I scaled up the filling by adding an 80% bar to get "dark" back into the mix.
Got to say, it turned out well. I cut the serving into 1"x2" pieces and left off the decorative cocoa.
So...I can recommend the attached recipe, but am withholding my recommendation of his book.
http://www.cake-boy.co.uk/view_recipe.php?id=34
Now, I DID NOT use the attached recipe. I made it from his book "Tart it Up" by Eric Lanlard (Cake Boy) and picked this tart because I wanted to get rid of a 3.5 oz bar of Godiva Salted Caramel Chocolate that I opened and promptly despised. Honestly, I'm praying nightly for that whole salty/sweet trend to die a terrible death soon. Sooner than soon.
Also, I wanted to try his chocolate tart crust.
Anyway, back to the tart....I had Cake Boy's book from the library and am here to say that while I loved many of his ideas, I HATED the font size and how the ingredient amounts were specified. (insert conditional statement: this is my OLD EYES bi+ching.)
I made THREE, count 'em...THREE mistakes based on not reading the text correctly...AND I WAS WEARING MY READING GLASSES!
Annoyances: Mr. Cake Boy is British and this book is...well, I'm not sure what nationality. If you'll look at the attached recipe, it's written using British ingredients/terms and provides weights. The book, however, is written in American measurement (cups) and provides NO weights! Apparently, his publishers believes that lazy American cookbook buyers are incapable of using a scale.
(Boy, I'm crankier than I realized about this, considering the dish turned out well.)
So...I know he's British and he's specifying "light cream"....what does that mean to me, sitting here in mid-rural America? After scanning a few Internet searches that failed to compare British creams to American creams, I used a 50:50 ratio of half/half and heavy cream because that's what I had.
In the chocolate tart base, he calls out cocoa. Okay, he's British, so does that mean Dutch process cocoa? Hell if I know. Again, I ended up using what I had, which was half Droste and half Hershey's, straddling, as it were, the Hadrian Wall of Cocoa.
And this is where I made Measuring Mistake #1: I misread 1/4 C of cocoa as 3/4 C (explaining why I had to dip into both stashes of cocoa). That meant 5 minutes of carefully removing excess cocoa because I had ALSO missed the extra 2 TBL of flour (Mistake #2) and dumped it on top of the cocoa.
He also added an extra TBL of powdered sugar which I missed with the 1/3 C and OH FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, WHY DIDN'T HE JUST GIVE US THE DAMN WEIGHTS!
He didn't specify egg size, so I used Jumbo, not caring anymore.
He didn't specify what percentage of chocolate (just "dark") so I used the Godiva bar and a Godiva white chocolate coconut to go with the whole West Indies spice thing. Then I realized that might turn out sweeter than I wanted so I scaled up the filling by adding an 80% bar to get "dark" back into the mix.
Got to say, it turned out well. I cut the serving into 1"x2" pieces and left off the decorative cocoa.
So...I can recommend the attached recipe, but am withholding my recommendation of his book.
http://www.cake-boy.co.uk/view_recipe.php?id=34