Baking Season is Nigh Upon Us

With the hint of fall in the air, my thoughts are turning more frequently to baking. A friend's recent birthday offered the perfect excuse to pull out the stops for a decadant dessert.

This is a basic chocolate tart with a few embellishments. While I like to ooh and ahh over really fancy cakes and pastries (I still frequently drool over the photographs from Saveur magazine of the Demel bakery in Vienna), sometimes the simplest tarts can be stunning as well. And they are far easier to accomplish, especially when you have other pesky commitments like jobs, spouses, housework and pets.

This tart has a basic chocolate tart crust (I think I used Alice Medrich's recipe from Cocolat), and a simple ganache made with equal parts (by weight) of fresh cream and good quality 59% bittersweet chocolate from a local gourmet food store. I hadn't heard of the brand before (Cordillera), but it is one of the best chocolates I have eaten in a long time. It has a lot of fruity, maybe even floral, undertones. To gild the lily I threw in a couple of tablespoons of good bourbon (Woodford Reserve).

One nice thing about our move is that I can now easily find non-ultra-pasteurized cream, formerly known simply as cream.

May I digress but for a moment? I fondly remember the local creamery in my teeny, tiny hometown in rural North Dakota. It was just a couple of blocks from my parent's house, and whenever we needed cream we would grab the Tupperware pitcher and walk to the creamery. There, a creamery worker would take a ladle with the longest handle I had ever seen, dip it into a gigantic vat (hundreds of gallons) of fresh cream (fresh as in in the cow that morning), and fill our container with this thick, ivory nectar of the gods. I know that sometimes we see the world through rose colored glasses, but I know that the cream we purchased from that now-defunct creamery was thicker, richer and better-tasting than the cream now sitting in grocery store coolers, full of carrageenan and guar gum. Ah, the good ol' days. Maybe not everything was better back then (the fashions of the 70s were horrendous, for one thing), but that cream sure was.

Anyhoo, the regular, just plain pasteurized cream whips up much better than the ultra-pasteurized version, although the taste difference is not as pronounced as I hoped it would be. I've found that it lasts a few days beyond the sell-by date, which is good since I don't always use it immediately.

The raspberries came from the local farmer's market, and were perfectly, delicately fresh.

OK, now it is confession time. I was going to just put the cocoa border around the edge and leave the beautiful, nearly flawless shiny center of the tart alone. I had gone to extra lengths to ensure a perfectly smooth top, being very gentle in stirring the cream and chocolate to not incorporate too much air, and painstakingly pricking the few bubbles that emerged after pouring by using a very thin cake tester to pop each tiny little flaw. I carefully leveled the tart in the fridge, sticking a skewer under the low side. However, all that work went down the tubes when I left the cake stencil on just a tad too long and it stuck to the middle of the tart. Aaaarrrrrggggghhhhh! (Yeah, I sound like a pirate when I bake.) Surprisingly, I didn't swear much, though. I immediately went to Plan B, stuck a star tip on a pastry bag, filled it with the whipped cream I was going to serve the tart with anyway, and piped a quick border in the center. I added the raspberries and no one was the wiser. At least not until now.

The border, by the way, is from a Martha Stewart Spring cake stencil set. This particular border is supposed to look like grass, and of course you would use green sugar for it. The illustration shows little candy easter eggs in the center of the cake using this border. However, I thought it had a contemporary abstract vibe to it, so I used it for this tart. The other borders in the set, however, are pretty unambiguous like eggs and butterflies. This was a guy's birthday dessert and butterflies just didn't seem suitable. He really liked the tart (and so did I).