Raspberry tarts with chocolate pastry

One of the highlights of skiing trips used to be stopping at the service stations on the way down through France, and buying a raspberry tart.  They were always delicious, with a crisp pastry, unctuous filling and firm tart raspberries on top.  The two I had each year were enough, but no, of course, I wont be buying them even if I do manage a trip to France.  I have been intending to make a version for myself, and now I need  the recipe for to complete my Fruit Pies, Cakes and Puddings recipe book, I am running some tests.

First question - shall I stick to plain pastry or do a chocolate pastry.  I like chocolate with raspberries.
If chocolate pastry, then shall it be an ordinary shortcrust with added cocoa and sugar or shall I add some egg?  Shall I try my new coconut fat instead of butter?  How strong a chocolate taste? I can see myself with a sequence of about twenty pastries to try.

To start with, a simple enriched pastry, and if I don't think it works I'll try the other varieties.


150g flour (40% urid, 40& tapioca, 20% cornmeal)
100g ground almond
125g butter
50g caster sugar
20g cocoa
1 egg

Rub fat into flour, stir in cocoa and sugar, mix in egg.  Form into a ball, wrap and leave to rest at room temperature for fifteen minutes.  Don't put it in the fridge or you wont be able to shape it.

Cut pastry into four.  Press into small tart tins with removable base or whatever shape you have / like.

Bake for fifteen minutes at 180C

Leave until cold.  Fill with cold plain or chocolate pastry cream and top with raspberries.

You can make these in advance, freeze, and just make your dessert with bought pastry cream and raspberries for an almost instant fancy desert.

250ml milk
60g sugar
10g flour
3 egg yolks
tsp vanilla

This amount of pastry cream filled two tarts.  I put the others in the freezer for later.

A punnet of raspberries gave a single layer of fruit on top of each tart.

This was quite good, but the balance of pastry to cream to fruit wasn't quite right.  Either the pastry needs to be a bit thinner or I need to pile the raspberries up higher, never mind the elegance.  The pastry was a good texture, holding well but not giving much resistance when chewed.

Desperation Desert- raspberry and chocolate gluten-free profiteroles

I don't normally feel in need of a desert, but after a highly effective dash to late night shops and doing almost all my Christmas shopping in an hour I arrived home wanting a sweet treat.  A raid of the freezer found raspberries and choux buns, cream from the fridge and chocolate from the store cupboard.

Choux buns are very easy to make using gluten-free flour.  They are one of the few baked foods I make using a standard flour mix - in the case Doves Farm.   They freeze well.  I would usually crisp them up in a  hot oven, but this time they had about twenty seconds in the microwave.  A quick zap of the raspberries, and then melted the chocolate with the cream in the microwave.  From the start of the craving to the giant bowl of desert took about two minutes.

I'll make sure I write up the choux buns sometime, but do have a go with any standard recipe. They are very easy to make, just use a little less flour to butter.  I make these for mass catering at parties - the last time I made three hundred choux buns for a summer party, served in a giant plastic tub, with another large bowl of cream, one of chocolate, and a load of strawberries.  People were left to assemble their own bowlfuls of desert with whatever proportions they liked.  I was once startled at a party when someone had their chocolate sauce with the iceberg lettuce, but hey, why not?  Lettuce is a perfectly good carrier for flavours and chocolate sauce is not that different that salad dressing - sugar, fat, complex flavours...