Chocolate-Crunched Caramel Tart

Carla of Chocolate Moosey picked this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe. She chose Chocolate-Crunched Caramel Tart, which is a tart with caramel, honey-roasted peanuts and chocolate ganache. Yum! You can visit Carla's blog for the complete recipe. I was so excited to make this tart. It has all of the flavors that I love. The tart kind of reminds me of a Snickers candy bar. The recipe also uses a press-in-the-pan pastry, which was a relief as I had recently had very bad luck rolling out dough.

Most of the elements of this tart I had made before. I’ve made caramel before, and I make ganache quite frequently. Dorie recommends using honey roasted peanuts from Trader Joe’s. We have a Trader Joe’s near us but it is also so busy and I feel so claustrophobic in the store, that I usually avoid it. We were nearby the other day so I made a quick run over to pick up the nuts. I’m really glad that I did because these are so good. I’m glad that the recipe only calls for ¾ of a cup of peanuts since I kept eating them out of the bag. They are highly addictive and very, very good. I need to think of something to bake that will use up the leftover nuts or I’ll just end up eating them all!

This tart looks quite fancy when everything is all said and done, but the steps were quite simple and didn’t take very long. The pastry is made in a food processor and takes just minutes. He caramel is the most complex element, but as long as you have all of the ingredients ready it was no sweat. My caramel came to a boil almost immediately, so that was nice. I didn’t use a candy thermometer, but I’m fairly certain that my caramel was at the right temperature. The caramel gets sticky fast, so I’m glad I didn’t wait too long before adding the chopped peanuts.

The ganache: chocolate, heavy cream, and butter: is such a beautiful thing. Simple, but so tasty in the end. I put the tart together and refrigerated it a bit longer than the 30 minutes that the recipe suggests. The caramel was a little too firm, but I left the tart sit at room temperature overnight and the caramel softened considerably. I was really happy with this tart: it tastes great, looks impressive and comes together without a lot of effort.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 355-357.