Chocolate Truffle Crostata

This Daring Bakers challenge came at a very busy time, so this isn't too wild. No giant profiterole presents or baked alaska mountain ranges this month. Just a really yummy chocolate tart. 

The 2010 November Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Simona of briciole. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make pasta frolla for a crostata.  She used her own experience as a source, as well as information from Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well.

I chose to make the first pasta frolla for my crostata. I had a few ideas for fillings, but in the end I settled on this yummy chocolate truffle filling. I've made it once before and it's a great recipe. The coffee comes through fairly strongly, especially when the tart is cold. I wasn't sure about the pastry when I took it out of the fridge to roll - it had got all sweaty and solid. It came out in the end, though. Perhaps not my favourite pastry ever, but it was fun to do something different. 

Originally I wanted to do a lace design on top of my crostata. Then I came across quite a lot of complications when trying to design it and the pastry turned out to be fairly hard to work with, so I switched to this art deco design. I cut the design out of the rolled out pastry with a knife and then baked the pieces separately, chilling throughly in between. When it came out of the oven I arranged the pieces on the top. Another time I would wait until it had cooled slightly as the top tore slightly in places and I misplaced a few pieces and couldn't move them without causing chaos. 

To find the recipe for the pastry, head over to the Daring Bakers website. The chocolate truffle filling is from Tartelette - I halved it to fill this tart.