Chocolate Truffle Tartlets

Tuesdays with Dorie

For a chocolate lover like myself, this week's Chocolate Truffle Tartlets are the perfect dessert. Not one, but three different kinds of chocolate served in a chocolate tart shell along with little bits of biscotti make this a rich and very satisfying treat. The recipe is by contributing baker David Ogonowski. Thank you to Steph, Spike, Jaime, and Jessica for hosting this week's recipe. You can find the recipe on their blogs.

Making the chocolate dough was fun and reminded me of making mud pies when I was little because you put the flour, sugar, cocoa powder and salt on your work board and mix it together with your fingers and after you add the bits of butter you work the butter in, again, with your fingers. It's not until you make a well and put the egg yolk and vanilla in the center of the well, along with a tablespoon of ice water, that the real fun begins. Mixing it all together with your fingers and smearing the butter across the board is a little like finger painting, only with chocolate butter. Just when you think it is not going to come together, magically it does and you form it into a rectangle, cut the dough in half, wrap the halves in plastic and chill for at least a half hour.

After the dough chilled, I rolled it out between two pieces of saran wrap. It was really easy to work with. I had enough dough with one of the halves to make four 4-inch tart shells. Once you gently lay the rolled out dough in the tart shells, you chill it again for at least 20 minutes, then prick the bottom of the shells with a fork and slide the shells into the oven for 12-15 minutes. They were done in 11 minutes in my oven.

The filling was easy to make. Butter and bittersweet chocolate is melted over a double boiler and then egg yolks are beaten and added after the chocolate mixture has cooled. Chunks of milk chocolate, white chocolate, and biscotti are then folded in. I used salted caramel biscotti in my filling.

Using an ice cream scoop to scoop the filling into the tart shells is a great tip and the offset spatula helps to level the filling. I put my tartlets in the oven and after 12 minutes they were set. I cooled them for awhile on the cooling rack.

I served them when they were still a little warm and sprinkled bits of the salted caramel biscotti on top along with a drizzle of Fleur de Sel salted caramel.

The smooth bittersweet chocolatey filling combined with the melting chunks of white and milk chocolate and the crunch of the salted caramel biscotti is melt-in-your-mouth wonderful and then you get a taste of the chocolate cookie-like pastry shell along with it and it is bliss - pure chocolate bliss.