Fudgy Pudgy Brownie Tart

This is almost like two different desserts.  If you eat it while it's still warmish, it's like a rich flourless (or semi-flourless) torte.  Slightly underdone, like a lava cake with nuts.  If you eat it straight from the refrigerator, as Rose recommends, it tastes slightly sweeter, almost like a piece of fudge.  If it's room temperature or warmer, you can barely distinguish the crust part of the tart, but cold, it's much more obvious.  I can see why you'd like it cold and fudgy, but I think I actually preferred it as a piece of cake that just happened to be ensconced in a tart shell.

I've been getting pretty proud of myself for handling pie crust.  This is pate sucree, not pie crust, I guess, but I found it harder to handle.  And, of course, smudges of flour and bits of butter all show much more clearly on the dark brown dough than they do on the more innocuous neutral color of our old standby cream cheese crust.

Of course, this chocolate is the heart of the matter.  A mixture of Valrhona and Scharffenberger.  I prefer cakes, tarts, pies--whatever this is--made with chocolate than with cocoa.  Anything made with cocoa has a sort of dryish aftertaste to me, which I'm more than willing to admit could be purely my imagination.  Still, it does make me feel good to start a recipe with a nice stack of dark chocolate.

Thanks to Rose once again for this well-designed, easy-to-use double boiler, especially since it's a one-piece double boiler.  I guess that's a sort of contradiction in terms, but it does have a separate place to heat water, so why doesn't that make it a "double"?



Rich, dark chocolate, studded with nuts going into a buttery chocolate cookie crust.  Hard to tell which is the gilding and which is the lily.  I have no objections to plain lilies, but I'm also not averse to gilded ones.

At room temperature, or slightly warmer than room temp, you can see that it looks a bit underdone.  But I did follow the directions, including taking the temperature of the middle of the cake (pie?)  Whether it was supposed to be that way or not, it was delicious.

JJ decides that a brownie tart is definitely finger food.  But see how fastidious (relatively) he is?  A napkin clasped in his hand at all times.  Chocolate and ice cream make him a happy boy.