Signature Dish:
Chocolate Tart
About the dish ...
Host: "We'd very much like you to make a chocolate tart this week. Now, the pastry can be any kind of pastry you want, as long as it's chocolate flavored. The filling can be anything you want, as long as it's chocolate flavored. And you can use any decoration you want. Although my betting is that you'll use chocolate."
This is a semi final now. There is no room for error. If they make an error making the chocolate tart at this point, it can prove fatal. Going into the final, you have to be on it. Chocolate tart sounds very simple, but it's got to be immense, immaculate. It's got to be a superb flavor. It's got to taste brilliant. It's not as easy as it sounds. I'm just making a sweet, short crust, but basically swapping some of the flour for cocoa. I think the addition of cocoa to pastry is a bit of a nightmare. You think adding a dry ingredient into a fairly dry mixture would be fine, but unfortunately it's not as plain sailing as appears. I think when you add the cocoa powder, it does become a little bit more brittle, so I think that's the worry. The trick to making perfect chocolate pastry is adding just enough liquid to counteract the dryness of the cocoa and bind all of the ingredients together.
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