Warm Chocolate Tart

French are leaders in pastry making among many other things! Often recipes from famous chefs are long and time demanding given the perfection desired. Not surprisingly, I have been looking for recipes by French chefs which are short and sweet for some time now!  One of my favorite places to go and work (or to pretend) on weekends is the public library where I happily take rather frequent breaks to search through the cookbook sections.

On one such occasion, I noticed a book titled "Simply Sensational Desserts: 140 Classics for the Home Baker from New York's Famous Patisserie and Bistro" by Francois Payard who is originally from France and now owns a bakery in NYC. His bakery is definitely on my "go-to places" for next NYC trip.  Pictures in the book are beautiful and most of the recipes are in comfort zone of the home bakers. I learnt about dessert soups, for the first time, which are made of fruits from his book.   I tried two of his recipes "Warm Chocolate tart" and "French Pear Tart". Even though both were good, I really enjoyed the warm chocolate tart because its relatively less time consuming and tastes really good.  The book also has a section on what types of pans home bakers should have for uniform baking. Upon his recommendation, I ended up ordering  9.5" aluminum tart pan from amazon which I really liked and also got me thinking: Do we really need non-stick pans for baking?

One of my good friend from undergrad and her husband visited us last weekend. I wanted to make the Warm Chocolate Tart for them but the book was checked out at the library (lazy me didn't write down the recipe last time).  Google Maharaj came to rescue and luckily I found the Warm Chocolate Tart recipe from Francois book on a website which basically publicize books from authors and share few recipes from the book, chosen by authors, on their website.  Here is the dough and chocolate tart recipes from Simply Sensational Desserts.

Without doubt, the key ingredient in this tart is chocolate. I can't stress more about the importance of a good quality chocolate for this tart. One of my favorite baking chocolate is Scharffen Berger (semi-sweet) which I have previously used for making Sachertorte and chocolate coated strawberries with great satisfaction. Good deals for this can be found on amazon in ended up using it frequently.

Warm chocolate tart is on my "go-to" recipes list!