Crisp chocolate tart

This is chocolate post #2, the first being my chewy chocolate chip cookies. H keeps on asking for a second batch. With a whole lot of coverture chocolate from my friend Liz, I have been wanting to try recipes to let the chocolate shine thru. This is a simple chocolate tart that I made after finding some tartlet shells frozen in the freezer. I made a fresh fruit tart about a month back and had completely forgotten about the scraps of pastry I used to fill these tartlet cases. Lucky for me I was arms deep in my freezer looking for dinner one night. 

The inspiration for this tart came from my favourite chocolate tart from Laurent’s Café and Chocolate Bar. I just love the tart and the atmosphere of the café or rather the “boutique” as the owner calls it. I’m sorry the café got such a lousy review. If you’re in the mood for some controversy, scroll down this page to read the review. I’ve personally not tried the other stuff. Each time we go, it’s the chocolate tart and the crème brulee. That’s it. Erm, maybe we need a lesson on having a sense of adventure. But I just love their tart so much. 

I used Damien Pignolet’s pate sucree from his book French. This is a crisp and buttery pastry. So buttery it left an oil stain on a paper napkin. So if you’re feeling indulgent or in need of a little love, these tartlets are just for you! I did not prick the base of fill these with baking weights while baking so the base rose and arched like a bridge like in the picture. Oops. I could have said that I forgot but the truth would be that its just something I don’t do most of the time. Maybe I will in future, to get perfectly formed tarts. If you can’t wait for the filling to set like me, eat it warm and you’ll have an oozy puddle of chocolate ganache on your plate. Best eaten with a glass of milk. 

 

Crisp Chocolate Tart                                                     

Makes 1 26-28cm tart shell or 6-8 tartlet shells

ingredients

1 egg yolk plus iced water to make up 60 ml 

30g icing sugar 

240g plain flour 

200g cold butter cut into cubes  

Method

Combine egg and water mixture with sugar in a small bowl. Beat the butter and flour in your electric beater till it resembles coarse bread crumbs. Add egg mixture and mix till just combined. Do not overwork pastry. Chill crust, pin out and fill tartlet shells. The pastry may be soft to handle. I just press it into the shell straight away and then chill for an hour. Bake at 190C till crisp and golden about 12-15 mins. 

Filling 

Good quality bittersweet chocolate 

1/3 (weight of chocolate) butter 

Method 

I’m really not sure about the quantity that would fill this amount of pastry as I only used the leftover scraps. I’m sorry! I guess you could look at the size of your tart shell and estimate. If you have too much, these can be chilled and rolled into truffles. Just melt together in a bowl in the microwave at high for about 20-30 secs and stir, pour into shell. Wait to set in the fridge at least an hour.

 

PS. These wonderful chocolate nibs from Liz are an excellent TV snack too!

The spoons have found a new home!

Congratulations! I will get in touch with you by email. Thanks to all who have shared my love of these small spoons.

The small spoon giveaway!

Happygrub turns 6 months and to celebrate this half year blogiversary (no one said a celebration needed to be yearly.. right? ) I’m giving away 6 spoons to anyone anywhere in the world for no cost at all. Just leave me a comment here in the next 2-3days and I will pick randomly thru a ballot and mail them to you within the next 6 weeks. I will announce the winner here. I picked up these adorable porcelain spoons at Chinatown and bought erm.. double digit numbers of 3 types of spoons. One is kinda longish, one is roundish and the last is a cute Chinese soup spoon shape.  When I brought them home, my mom thought midgets were coming over for tea. No mom, they’re just adorable small spoons. They’re as big as teaspoons and would be great for dainty cups of ice cream or custard. Or for scooping up little sauces or condiments. I love them. Just mail me a picture of what you used them for!

Sunlight on my food #1

These are supperinstereo’s great looking free form profiteroles. They should all be made these way instead of carefully piped! I love the sunlight in the photo. Have a joyful weekend! If anyone has any pictures on food with sun on them, feel free to leave me a comment and it’ll appear here.

 

Tea on my table

I’ve added on a new category in happygrub called “on my table”. Food looks best up close and personal, but I’ve really fallen in love with composing a shot of the food with other elements on the table. I hope you like the second shot that I took which was tea after a hard day at work on a busy Saturday. In the picture is the latest donna hay magazine which has a gorgeous gorgeous spread of a picnic in the woods. (Wenyin, I know you’re not into food as much as I am but buy the magazine just for this spread. You’ll love it!) What we had for tea were these chewy toothsome chocolate chip cookies. I’ve been waiting eagerly for my supply of couverture chocolate from Liz and finally got it after meeting up with the girls for dinner. H doesn’t really have a sweet tooth so I was the only one gleefully carrying my bag of chocolate and having chocolate filled dreams. I suddenly recalled that H loves chewy cookies and started hunting for a good recipe to incorporate the chocolate in. If you have a blog about cookies called cookiemadness, you must be mad enough about cookies and make really good ones.

 So this was the recipe I used, adapted from epicurious. I always halve the sugar in most recipes, because I like the cookie to taste like a cookie and not a candy bar. I’ve also converted my measurements to metric because I don’t have a measuring cup! I first baked this on a baking sheet and it spread like crazy, it was good, crisp around the edges and soft in the middle. But, I had difficulty scraping it off the sheet, it kind of stuck. Maybe it was because I didn’t butter the sheet. Its just one of the things I don’t do. Or sift flour. So far nothing serious has happened.. This was the moment I desperately wished I had a silicon baking sheet. Yes we are living in a silicon world and I am a silicon girl. So I took out the next best thing, my silicon daisy mould! The cookies turned out high and soft instead of flat.  

Chewy chocolate chip cookies

Adapted from Epicurious

Makes about 12 cookies 

200g plain flour

175g castor sugar

¾ tsp baking soda

¾ tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 small eggs

100g softened butter

150g chocolate chips or more if you like 

Method

Cream butter and sugar till fluffy. Add eggs and beat well. Beat flour and baking soda. Fold in choc chips. The mixture will be really liquid. Drop a tablespoon onto a baking sheet lined with parchment, well buttered or just onto a silicon mat. Or onto a silicon mould like I did. Bake at 190 for 15-18 mins or till golden brown.  

We were inspired ourselves to take a walk down MacRitchie Reservoir. Somehow we walked in the wrong direction and didn’t end up in the rainforest. It was great fun though.

The thinner the crust, the better

Pizza, everyone loves it, everyone has their own favourite form. Be it thin crust of thick, eaten crust first or middle first. Rolled up or cut up. With your fingers or with a knife and fork. With parmesan or with a splash of tobasco. Pizza is one of the most profitable things to sell, the cheap cost of the ingredients and the high price one has to pay is motivation enough to make this at home. Of course one has to be driven by a great love of pizza too. I like my pizza thin crust, crispy and with minimal ingredients. Just one or 2 toppings, max with good cheese and a crispy crust. H loves loves loves olives so our pizza has loads of it. And our salads. And our sandwiches. You can make you own tomato sauce like Hanne. Mine came from a jar.. JI always bake my pizza at my oven full whack at 250C to mimic the hearth of a clay brick pizza oven, or so I’ll like to imagine. Actually, maybe cos I’m greedy and impatient and like my pizza from rolled to finish in 6 mins. The high heat makes the bread light and airy. I make my bread like I always do, with cold water and risen in an airtight container.  I know that the pizza didn’t look that thin crusted in the photo. I think the edges tend to puff up a lot as there isn’t the weight of all the ingedients on it. But trust me, these were so floppy I wanted to roll up each slice and eat it in a mouthful.

THIN CRUST Pizza

Makes 5 medium sized pizzas 

Ingredients

500g bread flour

11g instant yeast (I used 1 satchet which was 11g, roughly equals 2 heaped teaspoons)

300 ml cold water

1 tablespoon sugar

2 tsp salt

2 tablespoons softened butter 

Method

Attach dough hook to mixer. Mix flour, yeast, sugar and salt for 1 min. Add water and mix at medium speed for 2 mins. Increase speed and add in the butter. Continue kneading for 12-15 mins till dough is well developed. Put the soft dough, it may be sticky, into an airtight container 3 x its size. Allow to prove for one hour. Flour hands and work suface. Roll into balls and roll out with a rolling pin, adding flour generously to prevent sticking. Roll as thin as you possible can, as the dough will rise a lot and ur thin crust will end up fairly thick otherwise. Place on baking sheet, add olive oil, tomato sauce, a good grating of cheddar and mozzarella, pepperoni and yes, loads of olives. Bake at 250C or as high as your oven can go for 5-6 mins till cheese is bubbly and golden.

  

I used the meat stuffing from my stuffed mushroom recipe as a topping.

Breakfast on my table

As I started posting more and more and interacting with different people in my blog and thru other blogs, I started adding more and more links to my blogroll. It started growing longer and longer and I started reading more and more. Some bloggers became such good friends, I just had to know what u were posting and what you were cooking! I have 2 great passions, one would be cooking and the other is crafty arty stuff. Cooking is something necessary as there has to be food on the table everyday. Art on the other hand is more a luxury, an indulgence. Something I hardly have time for most of the time. That’s why my favourite part of putting up a post is composing the photo that goes with it. I feel like its kind of an art form by itself. Or what I indulge myself to believing! Sometimes I just don’t feel like typing anything at all and let the photo speak for itself. Hanne of supperinstereo has given me great tips on photography, which I really appreciate and plan to use. A blog that I’ve been watching and love so much is “simply breakfast”. It has such beautiful photos and no words at all! Thats why I said watching, not reading.. The thing I love about photography is the emotion it brings out in you. I hope by looking at my very first breakfast shot, you felt like how I felt. Happy, sunny, light streaming in, doughnut melting in the sun (yes Singapore is that close to the equator), cold soy milk in tummy (my brother is lactose intolerant so we always have soy in the house), good book in view (just for the shot, I wasn’t reading) beautiful napkin in sight and a lovely wooden box and set of wooden tags in the background that Mel bought as a souvenir from her trip to Indonesia. So whatever you’re doing, be it sewing in the sun like Tommy, I hope you enjoy your weekend! I would love it if you could take up the challenge to compose your next shot with sunlight and leave me a comment about it, so I can see what you came up with!

PS. Can anyone spot the irony in this photograph?

Stuffed shrooms

Hannehanne of supperinstereo had asked me what I had planned to do with the Portobello mushrooms I had bought from the market last Sun. Well, I had a Monday lunch with one of my dear friends Liz of the chocolate factory fame and we had these together with my arugula salad, pizza, pizza and more homemade thin crust pizza. There are books written about Sunday lunch (ie  Gordon Ramsay’s) But no one writes about Monday lunch. I imagine people eating at work cafeterias or sweating it out at hawker centers. Who has time for a leisurely lunch on Mondays! Since Monday is the new Sunday for me, I dedicate Mondays to cook the one dish that I’ve always been planning to. Or in the case of that Monday, to cook a meal and enjoy the company of my dear curly haired friend. I have fallen in love with the taste of these mushrooms, they are so mushroomy and the beautiful large size and generous caps mean that they’re begging for a good stuffing. In order to retain their shape, I chose to prepare the meat stuffing first than stuffing them and allowing the mushrooms to grill in the oven. These are really easy to prepare and the stuffing also went atop one of our pizzas. I made a lot and froze half in the freezer. Its good when mixed with a beaten egg and plastered on French bread then fried egg mixture side down for an easy dinner. Or sometimes I stir thru tinned tomatoes and some pasta. The salad and pizza will come in another post. I also made a crème brulee from cooking with engineers which I have mixed emotions over. 

Stuffed Portobello mushrooms 

Ingredients

250g minced beef

1 small onion

1 clove garlic

1 small green chilli

Handful of chopped coriander

Salt to taste

8 medium Portobello mushrooms

Olive oil  

Method

Heat oil in pan. Saute onion till golden brown. Add chilli and garlic. Add minced beef and cook till dry. Season to taste. Stir in coriander and take off heat.  Trim stalks off mushroom. Spread olive oil on pan and drizzle on each mushroom. Sprinkle lightly with salt. Stuff with about tablespoon on meat mixture. Roast in oven at 180C for 20 mins. Finish with grating of parmesan cheese and reserved coriander stalks.  

Honey, nutty, corny, crispy.

A little while back I wrote about Mel’s gift of honey cornflakes. It was all gone too quickly, before a shot of them were taken. We recently baked up a new batch. They’re so easy to make and just require few easy steps of heating, stirring and baking. Mel had hers with cute thousand and ones on top. I made my batch with sliced almonds added for extra crunch. These have a strong honey and buttery taste and are really addictive. You can replace cornflakes with the same amount of rice crispies, or popped corn. I like to crumble mine over vanilla ice cream for a lazy dessert. These make a good gift in a pretty bottle with a beautiful bow and gift tag.   

Honey cornflakes

Ingredients

275g cornflakes

100g sliced almonds

250g butter

½ cup honey

4 tbsp sugar 

Method

Melt butter, honey and sugar in saucepan till it bubbles and becomes a thick homogenous mixture, about 5 mins. Pour into cornflakes and almonds, stir well to combine. Put into small paper cups. Bake at 180C for 6-8 mins. Leave to cool and crisp. Store in airtight container.

 

Loads of arugula

I visited the market today and discovered an old Chinese man in the middle of the Marine Parade wet market who sold leaves and herbs different from the other local produce around him. He had a beautiful range of mushrooms and interesting salad leaves and herbs. I bought some beautiful arugula from him and a bunch of Portobello mushrooms at a reasonable price. I think I might have overbought as I came back with a huge bunch of arugula and baby spinach leaves, more that we can eat! We had these as supper with cheddar and olives on toast. Looks like we’ll be having it for many meals till the novelty wears off..