Chocolate Cream Tart

This week's Tuesday's with Dorie recipe was for a chocolate cream tart. 

Let me start by saying that I am not a fan of custardy desserts, never have been. I can't stand the texture. I decided to give this tart a try, however, because I had never made pastry cream and wanted to give it a shot, plus the comments from the official TWD members were so positive that I thought maybe this tart would change my mind. 

I am so glad I gave this tart a shot. It consists of a bittersweet chocolate shortbread crust, chocolate pastry cream filling, and a whipped cream topping. It is delicious. Incredibly rich, but not heavy, and the texture of the filling was silky and divine.

All of the elements were fairly simple to put together, and I had so much fun making the pastry cream. 

I made a few changes to the recipe, but nothing major: the crust calls for 1 egg yolk, though in my excitement I neglected to notice the word "yolk" and put in an entire egg. It worked great anyway, and I baked it an extra 4 minutes to make sure it would be crunchy, not cakey; the pastry cream calls for bittersweet chocolate, but all I had on hand was semisweet so I used that and reduced the sugar from 6 tablespoons to 4 so it wouldn't be too sweet; the whipped topping calls for confectioner's sugar, but I prefer to put just a touch of honey in mine. All of the components of this tart work beautifully together, this recipe is definitely another winner! 

The above photo does not do this tart justice - I waited too long to photograph it, and it started to dry out around the edges... oh well... I promise it tastes a lot better than it looks in this photo. (It also looked a lot better 3 days ago when I made it)

Kim of Scrumptious Photography chose this recipe. You can find the recipe here.