Welcome to Melly’s Baking 🙂

My name is Mel. I absolutely love baking and I am a pastry chef in training. I am currently at culinary school completing a certificate IV in Patisserie. I also work at a gorgeous cupcake shop where we bake and ice the cupcakes fresh everyday.

I’ve created this blog as a way of sharing my passion for baking with others. I’m constantly trying new things and I want to use this blog to share everything I bake and all the new things I try out. I hope to become better with creating new recipes myself and have play around with the photography of my baked goods. Please be patient with me! I’m super excited to share my baking journey with you 🙂

So one of my first quests, is to find the perfect sweet short crust pastry recipe. So for each tart/pie recipe I post, I plan on posting a variation of the pastry recipe until I find my favourite!

For my very first post, I’ve decided to share a Pecan and Chocolate tart with you. It has been made a few times now for different events and I love it! The combination of chocolate, pecans and golden syrup in the filling is simply delicious. And this pastry is yummy and crumbly and great with the hint of pecans in it.  Enjoy 🙂

Mel xx

 

Pecan and Chocolate Tart

Adapted from the Delicious Sweet recipe book.

Ingredients
For the pastry:
25 g pecans
225g plain flour
110g butter, cubed and cold
110g icing sugar, sifted
1 egg

For the filling:
50g butter, softened
125g brown sugar
150ml golden syrup
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
100g dark chocolate
200g pecan nuts, chopped
Icing sugar for dusting

Method
For the pastry, place the pecans in a food processor and process to fine crumbs. Then combine the flour, sugar and butter in with the pecans until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add the egg and combine until the mixture comes together and forms a ball. Form into a disc, enclose in plastic wrap and chill for 30 minutes in the fridge.

Grease  a 23 cm loose-bottomed tart pan. Roll out the pastry between 2 pieces of baking paper, large enough to fit the tart pan. Press into pan and refridgerate for another 30 minutes. If you have some leftover pastry which is what happened to me, you can make some smaller tarts as well. This can happen if your tart pan is quite shallow.

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Line the chilled pastry with baking paper, then fill with pie-weights or uncooked rice and blind-bake for 10 minutes. Remove paper and weights, then return to the oven for a further 5 minutes until golden.

While the tart case is in the oven, prepare the filling. For this, place the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a bowl and beat until smooth. Add the egg, vanilla, chocolate and pecan nuts and combine. Pour into the tart case and bake for 30 minutes or until set. The smaller tarts will take less time to bake. Mine took 15 minutes. Set aside to cool.

Dust with icing sugar and serve at room temperature with cream if desired. Enjoy 🙂