Salted caramel and chocolate tartlets

Salted caramel and chocolate tartlets

• 22 Nov 2010

I've been dying to try out the little tartlet dishes I bought in Paris. I found this recipe ages ago on Nordljus's blog and bookmarked it. A few weeks ago whilst flipping through an old Vogue Entertaining magazine I found the original Claudia Fleming recipe. I photocopied it and took the recipe home with me because I thought it would be perfect to show off my little dishes.

But I'd found another recipe on the BBC (link now broken) so I decided to combine the two recipes. I had nothing but trouble with the BBC food recipe. I'd already tried the pastry recipe unsuccessfully in the past so I used the Claudia Fleming chocolate pastry recipe. It makes a very dark fragile pastry which tastes so good you could use it as cookie dough.

I bought all the ingredients for the caramel, followed the recipe exactly and the caramel promptly seized. Undaunted I returned to the shops and bought some glucose syrup to add to this caramel recipe. The caramel was so delicious I think I ate half of it before I could store it in the fridge.

I wanted to make a chocolate custard topping rather than using ganache. I find chocolate ganache way too rich. Another disaster - this time the custard mixture wouldn't set. I persevered long enough to make the 3 tarts you see below but for the mini chocolate, caramel and peanut tarts I looked through the fridge and managed to rustle up enough ingredients to make a chocolate ganache topping.

I took the tarts into work and they were eaten pretty quickly which is a good sign. Would I make them again? I remembered I had another chocolate custard recipe which worked well so I'd be prepared to try the recipe again using Claudia Fleming's pastry recipe/Gourmet Traveller's caramel recipe, topped by Valli Little's chocolate custard topping.

Many thanks to Bison Australia for the cute milk bottle seen in the photos.

I'll be back again on Wednesday so see you all then,

Jillian