(Aria) Chocolate Tart with Green Apple Sorbet & Baked Apple (Final Part to Saturday Lunch)

        I, being the dessert expert between the two of us, just had to make a dessert for our big Saturday lunch. It was one of 3 desserts to end the lunch. Having a lactose intolerant guest attending lunch also puts forward a little bit of a challenge for me to decide on what dessert I will make. For some reason though I kept being drawn to the idea of a chocolate tart so I thought, stuff it I will make what I want to make.

        I did try and accomodate for my lactose intolerant friend trying to find a recipe which used the least amount of dairy as possible but it was impossible to do. I just decided that I would make a nice sorbet to go with the tart and which was also dairy free so if she couldn't eat the tart, she wouldn't completely miss out on my dessert.

        I came across a Green Apple Sorbet recipe from Gorden Ramsay's book "Just Desserts" and thought it would be the perfect accompainment to my rich decadent chocolate tart. I also had to go buy a new blender as our old one had died (it was as old as I am). Knowing that I was making a soup and this sorbet I knew there was no way I could survive without a blender any longer.

        So I start preparing for Saturday's lunch on the Tuesday by preparing the base for my sorbet. 4 green apples, a lemon, a bottle of glucose syrup and some sugar and water will give me my sorbet.

        This is what you get after blending it all up, gorgeously green! The mixture is then strained.

        Once strained you are left with this bright green liquid. I feel that all the apple pulp is too good to be wasted so put it into a container thinking that there must be something I can do with it. I always keep leftover bits and pieces in the fridge and they always seem to get thrown out in the end anyway because I never find a use for them. At this stage it is getting late and I didn't want to be staying up too late in the kitchen this early in the week so I put the liquid into the fridge to churn the next day.

        So on the Wednesday I pull out the apple syrup mixture and my frozen cannister and churn my sorbet. This is pretty much the end result and it tasted absolutely wonderful. Sweet yet still tart from the green apples. I pop this into the freezer ready for Saturday.

        Thursday I decide to do my chocolate tart and thai pumpkin soup. The recipe I decided going with was the chocolate tart from the Matt Moran/Aria challenge on MasterChef Season 1. It seemed to be the tart that kept coming up in my google search for a chocolate tart recipe. There's even some other bloggers who have made it so I though "so be it".

        I only wanted to do the tart with the glaze so made those components only, everything else was just a little too fancy to be doing for a Saturday lunch. All that chocolate, butter and cream! I also have to go buy myself some tart pans as I have nothing suitable at home to make a tart in.

        I love food processors, rubbing butter, sugar and flour is all good but sometimes it's so so much more quick and efficient to do the "crumbing" stage in a food processor.

        Rich chocolatey pastry dough. It's crucial to rest this properly, something I didn't have quite enough time to do as I needed to have everything done that same night so that I don't have to do anything at Ryan's the next evening (apart from help him cook his Boeuf Bourguignon).

Chocolate filling mixture, combination of some evil ingredients.

        The filling and glaze pretty much look the same but obviously the glaze is thinner so it can "glaze" the top of the tart.

        The tarts are blind baked and then filled with the filling mixture then baked again. I bake the shells one at a time and the first one is slightly overcooked as I am not a good multi-tasker, I also forget to rest it after lining the tin so the pastry shrinks a bit more than the second one which gets a little bit of resting time in the fridge but still not enough to prevent it from shrinking. (There was enough pastry and filling for two "regular" sized tarts if following the recipe).

        I'm a little nervous about my tart and as I don't require all for Saturday so cut half of one (the darker one) and take it to work and organise a little "taste test". General conensus is that it's really good and rich. They are also fond of my little pieces of baked apple (read below), saying that they were suttle at first but had quite an impacting taste after you start chewing. I take it that my tart has got the go ahead to be served on Saturday =D.

        So remember how I put away all that strained apple pulp thinking that I could possibly do something with it? Well my great mind thought that perhaps there was some way I could dehydrate it and get some sort of apple flavoured sugar crystals or something (it contained a lot of sugar and glucose). Well I spread out the pulp thinly on a baking tray and put it into the oven on a low heat (I had it on 160 but it could have been even lower). Not really knowing what to expect all I could do was wait and see.

        So I look into the oven and saw that the tray was all brown, "drats" I thought. I pull out the tray and inspect these dried up peices of apple. I break off a piece finding it nice and crispy and try it. It was like a sweet apple crisp. As the apple had been chopped up into tiny pieces which were all glued together by all the sugar, you had all these small crispy bits joining each other, it was quite textural. I thought that this would be perfect to go with the apple sorbet. I have quite a fair bit of this leftover from the lunch so take it to work and snack on it. Was quite moreish!

        So Saturday comes and my guests are very impressed at the sight of my tart. I was worried that we wouldn't have any room for it after going through all the food we had but I think everyone was looking forward to dessert =). I cut up the tart and get Ryan to help me do some quinnels of sorbet, the sorbet has gone a little slushy as we kept it in the fridge since the morning (it was rock solid when I brang it to Ryan's). We also get a little bit of an audience with comments referring to MasterChef =D.

        The combination was quite exquisite. The tartness of the apple sorbet helped to cut the richness of the chocolate tart, there crunch of the pastry and also the pieces of baked apple. No one could quite figure out what these crispy bits were and when I inform them that it's baked apple I get some puzzled glances but everyone seemes to enjoy the dessert. There were 3 desserts in total but unfortunately we only have room for 2. So this rounds up the crazy week of cooking that Ryan and I went through just to prepare for a few hours of lunch with some friends.