Salted Caramel Chocolate Tart

Name: Salted Caramel Chocolate Tart
Yield: 8 tarts
Ingredients: CHOCOLATE SHORTBREAD TART DOUGH:; 1 1/4 cups of plain (all purpose flour); 1/4 cup of cocoa powder; 1/4 cup of icing sugar (confectioners); 1/4 tsp of salt; 128 g of cold unsalted butter (cut into small pieces); 1 large egg yolk; SALTED CARAMEL:; 225 g of caster sugar; 75 ml of water; 100 g of butter; 100 ml of cream; 1 tsp heaped of sea salt flakes; CHOCOLATE LAYER:; 100 g of caster sugar; 2 eggs; 2 egg yolks; 250 g of 70% cocoa chocolate (broken into pieces); 150 g of butter (cut into cubes)

Salted caramel is encased in chocolate pastry and topped with a gooey chocolate topping. This salted caramel chocolate tart is the ultimate in decadent.

I know cakes are the usual birthday fare, and as much as I love cakes I didn’t actually feel like a cake for my birthday today. I had my eye on the Salted Caramel Chocolate Tart recipe in Rachel Allen’s [amazon_link id=”0007309031″ target=”_blank” ]Entertaining at Home[/amazon_link] for some time but had put off making it. Mainly because my fiance doesn’t like salted caramel and there is no point making such a decadent recipe just for me, however with it being my birthday I decided if you can’t make exactly what you want and stop worrying about everyone else on your birthday when can you? So here today is my take on Rachel Allen’s Salted Caramel Chocolate Tart.

I only made a couple of slight changes to Rachel Allen’s recipe. Firstly I decided to make mini tarts. I love miniature foods, and well, it seems all the more decadent to me to be able to eat a whole mini tart than a slice of a bigger tart.

Secondly, I decided to go with a chocolate shortbread base, and for this, I used the ultra reliable Dorie Greenspan’s recipe from Baking. What I love about this tart base is that no rolling is required. Simply press into the tart tin and freeze for 30 minutes before baking and you have an ultra crumbly chocolatey base.

As much as I wanted to wait until today for my first bite of these tarts I just couldn’t. The allure of salted caramel is far too strong for me to resist, and I was telling myself I was taste testing them to make sure they would be ok for today, and indeed they are more than ok. Delicious, decadent, and ultra rich. Sadly despite my lustful thoughts of demolishing a whole mini tart, I was outdone and could not conquer it all in sitting. That didn’t stop my fiance, though, despite his protestations of not liking salted caramel. 🙂

While I didn’t make an actual cake to celebrate my birthday today, I will be making one this weekend because my parents are coming to visit on Sunday, for a week, and I haven’t actually spent any time with them around my birthday since I was 18 years old. So I thought a belated birthday cake would be the perfect thing to celebrate the occasion.

I have to say I’ve also been a little bit spoiled today by my fiance, as he does every birthday in fact. I still remember my first birthday we spent together. I happened to mention that we had a silly family tradition when my brother and I were little of having Fruit Loops for breakfast on our birthday. While I won’t say my parents were strict with our food, my brother and I weren’t allowed sugary cereals for breakfast, except twice a year – on our birthdays and Christmas – and for each occasion we would choose the most sugar laden cereal we knew of, being Froot Loops. I’d completely forgotten I’d told my fiance this fact, but low and behold, when my birthday came around he had organised a box of Froot Loops. At the time I couldn’t stop laughing as I thought it was so funny he remembered.

Firstly for my birthday today he gave me the most adorable dress I’d had my eye on for quite some time (which I will be wearing out to dinner tonight) and the most adorable card, full of romantic words complete with a puppy with a birthday cupcake on his head on the front. I was also spoiled with his special pancakes for breakfast. He doesn’t cook often, which he attributes to the blog, but when he does it always feels so special.

While the Fruit Loops tradition has gone by the wayside, now each birthday is celebrated with champagne, and my fiance cooking breakfast, along with a dinner out because apparently I’m not allowed to cook dinner on my birthday.

So tell me, do you have any silly or not so silly birthday traditions?