Chocolate Custard Tart

For the Pastry

• Pop all your flours, coconut sugar and cacao in your food processor or thermomix and pulse to combine and aerate (3 secs, speed 5 for TM users and about 5 seconds for Food Processor)

• Add your chilled ‘fats’ of choice
• Pulse until butter has disappeared into the flours (3 seconds on speed 6 for TM users / about 5 secs in a food processor)
• Whisk your egg, vanilla and syrup (if using syrup instead of coconut sugar) together in a bowl
• Add about 2/3 of this mixture slowly over 3-4 seconds into the processor. Has it gone to clumps? You’re done. Has it not? Add the rest.
• Spatula out onto unbleached parchment paper and shape into a ball and pop in fridge for 20 minutes to make it more workable, as at this stage, it will be a little wet.
• Preheat oven to 180C / 350F fan forced OR 200C / 400F non fan forced oven
• Now, line your quiche / tart tin with coconut oil or butter and then dust with buckwheat flour / sorghum flour and shake off excess. This will help you when it comes to dislodging the tart later on!
• Plop your pastry blob onto a layer of parchment paper and another piece of parchment on top – both a little longer than the tin’s length. TIP: If you used the syrup, dust the parchment and top of pastry ball with a little flour.
• Roll the pastry into the shape you need for the tin you’ve chosen.
• Peel top layer of parchment off
• Flip parchment over on top of the tin and ease the pastry into the tin, pressing well into all the corners. Do not panic if your pastry cracks. Just top with a little blob of pastry from your excess and ‘plug’ the hole.
• Any excess pastry? Make a couple of short bread cookies out of it.
• Now, place parchment on top and weight it down with raw beans, rice grains or pastry weights and blind bake in the oven for 10 minutes with the weights in, and a further 15-20 minutes without – this will mean your base isn’t soggy for the finished product later – no one likes a soggy bottom!
• Once the pastry is a nice deep brown without being black, it’s ready. Set aside.

For the Chocolate Custard

• START MAKING WHEN YOU REMOVE THE BLIND BAKING BEANS OUT OF THE TART SHELL TO GET THE TIMING RIGHT.
• If you have a thermomix, place all the ingredients except the gelatin powder and chocolate into the TM and set timer to 7 minutes, 80 degrees. Then blend in the gelatin at the end, 5 seconds speed 6. Then blend the chocolate in, speed 7, 20 seconds. You’re done.
• If you don’t, here’s the wonderful and easy, traditional way of making custard.
• Mix your sweetness of choice and tapioca flour with your eggs.
• Separately, heat coconut cream, water and vanilla on the stove in a saucepan until just a bubble or two are sighted.
• Pour the coconut mixture very, very slowly into the egg and syrup bowl, continually stirring. If you pour too fast, you will cook the eggs into chunks and we don’t want that.
• Then, pour everything back into the saucepan, low-med heat and stir continually until custard thickens. Once thickened, add the gelatin with a whisk, whisking for a few good seconds until incorporated. Then, break the block of dark chocolate into the saucepan and whisk around until it is fully melted and your custard is rich and chocolaty.
• As the great Maggie Beer has a rule about pastry: Cold filling into cold pastry shell. Hot into hot shell. So, if you made your tart shell a while ago and it’s cool, cool your custard a little too before filling the shell.
• Pour your custard into the tart shell. If you have some left, just fill a couple of ramekins for a delicious little back up dessert for another day.
• Let it set in the fridge and when it comes to dislodging, do it carefully and steadily, only when the tart is fully set. I never take mine off the base, either, I just lift it out of the tin and leave the base under it.
• You can add a garnish of freshly shaved / grated dark chocolate as I’ve done here, or even toasted coconut would be gorgeous.
• Then slice and serve with some ice cream of your choice or crème fraiche and whatever berries you could find.