Dark chocolate & honey pear tart: a sweet short pastry, rich dark chocolate filling and golden honey roasted pears. Jump to recipe.
Unfortunately very little has changed since the last recipe here – Melbourne remains in hard lockdown, work remains work, life remains limited to takeaway coffee from down the road and runs within a 5km radius and regular house cooking adventures because these are the small things we have left. (If you need inspiration, might I recommend Ixta Belfridge’s biang biang noodles heavy on the sichuan pepper, Alison Roman’s roast pumpkin with pistachio butter on yogurt, basically made to be mopped up with your fingers, and a morning tea rendition of these blueberry scones with lemon curd and cream).
While our bubble shrinks, the feeling of helplessness only increased this week as we watched Kabul fall to the Taliban in a massive backwards step for women’s rights and heard the catastrophic predictions of the latest IPCC climate report – only for our government to continue to pretend it doesn’t exist. The onslaught of COVID news overwhelms even this: vaccine targets (will they or won’t they work), case numbers (linked or mysterious), “freedom” protests in Melbourne (the most disgusting and selfish super-spreader events we have seen yet). It’s hard to feel optimistic. I also have no answers to the above besides what we have all heard before and which many people can articulate much better than me.
For the moment I only have a dark chocolate & honey pear tart. A small tangible joy. Pears sliced and oven roasted until golden and sweet and fragrant with honey and vanilla. Crisp buttery pastry. A rich baked chocolate and almond filling, somewhere between a ganache and a flourless chocolate cake. It’ll do anything from a lockdown house to a fully fledged dinner party.
- 4 ripe pears (I use beurre bosc)
- 1/4 cup honey
- 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
- 1/2 cup water
- 1 teaspoon vanilla paste or a whole vanilla bean seeds scraped
- 200 g plain flour (1 1/2 cups)
- 65 g icing sugar (1/2 cup)
- pinch of salt
- 140 g butter refrigerator cold chopped into cubes
- 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
- 1 teaspoon white vinegar
- 1 egg yolk
- 1 tablespoon ice water if needed
- 1/2 cup cream (125ml)
- 25 g unsalted butter
- 110 g dark chocolate finely chopped
- 2 eggs
- 50 g caster sugar (1/4 cup)
- 35 g ground almonds (1/3 cup)
- extra icing sugar to dust
-
Combine the flour, icing sugar and salt a food processor or bowl, if doing by hand.
-
Add the cold butter cubes and pulse until the largest pieces of butter are just bigger than pea-size. Add the vanilla essence, white vinegar and egg yolk. Pulse on medium speed just until the dough starts just clumping together, 6-10 times. It will still be crumbly but should hold together if you pinch it between your fingers. Add a tablespoon of ice water if it seems too dry. Tip out onto a lightly floured surface, bring together with your hands and firmly press into a disc. Wrap in cling film and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight.
-
Grease a rectangular tart tin. Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured bench to just bigger than your tin and line the tart tin, pressing firmly into the sides. If it is too hard to roll, leave it at room temperature for 10 minutes to soften a little. If it rips at all or you find that one edge is too thin, it is easy to use the leftover pastry scraps to patch it back together.
-
Trim the pastry to form a neat edge – I usually roll my rolling pin over the edge to cut through the pastry. Use your fingers to press the pastry edges up the sides of the tin so the top sits just above the level of the tin – this helps if it shrinks a little while baking.
-
Rest the lined tart tin in the freezer for at least 30 minutes.
-
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Line the pastry case with foil, then fill it with dry rice or pie weights and blind bake for 15 minutes. Remove the weights and foil, then return to the oven for a further 5-10 minutes, or until light golden and completely dry. Set aside while you make the filling.
-
Preheat oven to 180°C.
-
Peel the pears and slice into 6 segments each – 8ths if very large.
-
Place in a single layer in a baking dish and mix the honey, brown sugar, water and vanilla through to evenly coat.
-
Bake covered (either with a lid or with a sheet of baking paper) for 20 minutes, then remove the lid, turn the pears over to coat with syrup and bake for a further 20 minutes until golden and tender.
-
Set aside to cool
-
Place the finely chopped chocolate in a bowl
-
Heat the cream and butter in a small saucepan until almost simmering and the butter has melted
-
Pour over the chopped chocolate and leave for 5 minutes. Use a whisk to combine into a smooth ganache.
-
Add the eggs, one at a time, whisking to fully combine.
-
Add the caster sugar and ground almonds and stir to just combine.
-
Pour the chocolate filling into the blind baked tart tin.
-
Starting from the middle, gently place honey baked pears in rows over the filling (you will probably have some left over – keep for serving with the tart)
-
Bake for 20-25 minutes or until the chocolate has just set with a little bit of wobble still in the middle.
-
Set aside to cool completely.
-
Dust very lightly with icing sugar before serving with any extra pears, ice cream and warm syrup.
Leave a Reply