A couple of weeks ago I saw a TV advert that William Wood, head pastry chef and creator of Careme Pastry would be appearing on a Master Class session of Master Chef Australia. Now I will admit I don’t watch Master Chef, but when I heard William Wood would be on I was eager to tune in to see his tips and tricks for making pastry. After watching the episode I nipped over to the Master Chef website and grabbed the recipe thinking I would give it a go just to compare how it stood up to the version I normally use. I put the recipe away and didn’t think anymore of it until I decided to make Mandarin and Chocolate tarts, perfect right? I could try out this new pastry recipe at the same time. I started measuring out my ingredients, went to grab the eggs checked the recipe: 9 egg yolks….. what? You have got to be kidding me. I checked further down into the instructions and it said add 6 egg yolks to the flour. Oooookkk definitely a typo in the recipe. I knew that the 9 eggs was wrong, but even 6 sounded excessive. On a whim I decided to give it a go anyway just to see what would happen – nothing ventured, nothing gained…
Once I made the pastry, and it was resting in the fridge, out of curiosity I went back on the website to recheck, only to find that it had been amended (after a few complaints by other readers). Turns out only 4 egg yolks were needed; 3 for the recipe and 1 for brushing the pastry. I know, I know I should have checked again before I made the pastry 🙂
Anyway, to cut a long story short, when I took the pastry out of the fridge it wasn’t wet from excess egg. It was soft and felt exactly right and it handled beautifully. I decided to bake the pastry cases, as an experiment. I was fully expecting them to melt into an eggy puddle in the pans from using double the amount of egg required. To my surprise, they turned out perfectly. Now I feel the need to experiment again and make the pastry recipe the correct way with 3 egg yolks to see the difference, stay tuned I’ll let you know how it goes.
Now back to the tarts, when I was making mandarin marmalade last week I had it in my mind that the mandarin jam would go perfectly with chocolate so that was the inspiration for these tarts. As I wasn’t sure how the flavour combination would go over I also made some salted caramel ones, who doesn’t like salted caramel right? Hey, I believe in covering all my bases. The verdict: it turned out the mandarin flavour was more popular than the salted caramel, the bitterness of the mandarin marmalade was the perfect foil for the chocolate.
The photos were taken when the tarts were still at room temperature so the caramel and jam would ooze out, but then I put them in the fridge to firm up before I served them.
Recipe
Makes 6 mandarin and 6 salted caramel tarts.
Make one quantity of shortcrust pastry using William Wood’s recipe or make using this recipe.
Make a half quantity of salted caramel.
Make or buy mandarin marmalade.
Chocolate Ganache
- 200gm dark chocolate, chopped coarsely
- 200gm pure cream
- 20ml honey (optional).
Place chocolate in a heat proof bowl.
In a medium saucepan bring cream and honey to boil. Remove from stove and pour over chocolate.
Whisk mixture until smooth.
Allow to cool to room temperature and to thicken before pouring in tarts.
Method
Spray a 12 hole cake pan lightly with oil. Roll out the pastry. Using a circle cutter, cut 12 circles in the pastry. The cutter needs to be big enough so that pastry fills the hole in the tin perfectly. Fit the pastry circles in pan.
To blind bake the pastry cases line the top of each pastry case with either tin foil or baking paper and fill with ceramic beads. Bake at 180°C for 8 minutes. Remove beads and foil/paper. Brush the inside of pastry case with egg wash (1 egg yolk, lightly beaten with a dash of cream)Return to oven and bake for a further 8 minutes or until golden and baked. Cool slightly in pan then turn out cases onto a wire rack and allow to completely cool.
When cases are cold partly fill with either the salted caramel or the mandarin marmalade.
Top with the chocolate ganache. Refrigerate until firm.
I have topped the salted caramel tarts with crushed caramel shards and the marmalade tarts with pieces of mandarin peel from the jam.
The Lemon Grove Cake Diaries 
Funny about the recipe error. You’ve discovered that a bit too many eggs is not much of a problem; the other way is an issue as they serve as binders. I’ll bet it was tasty with an eggy crust! These really are lovely.
Look at those! Beautiful photographs.
Drool worthy photos…looks amazing. I love marmalade and I can imagine how great the chocolate tastes with it.
What a wonderful recipe and amazing photography – I love the taste of madarins and the combination of chocolate, salted caramel and mandarins sounds awfully tempting! One delicious post!
Have a great weekend!
Ooh what a nice surprise! And I guess you really had to try it since it was already mixed. Their pastry is great to use 🙂
That is a tough choice! There is something special about chocolate and citrus flavors combined, but I really do love salted caramel as well. Looks delicious!!
Oh my gosh…! You have no idea how excited I was when I saw the salted caramel tarts. That oozing, thick and beautiful caramel looks mouthwatering! I actually made some mandarin marmalade last week… my friend has a few trees and he delivered me a couple of really big bags of fruit. I’ll have to venture out and try both of these tart recipes! Oh, and I’m disappointed that I missed the Careme episode. I’ll have to catch up on line. Sorry about the recipe errors on their site, argh!! Can’t believe that they made such a huge mistake with the quantities!! 😦
Thanks for this beautiful recipe xx
I had always heard of Careme pastry but had never tried it as none of my local shops sell it so I was happy to see the recipe come up on tv. Even with the mistake in quantities it was a beautiful pastry.
It’s only stocked in specific supermarkets. I’ve seen it in a few IGA’s here and in David Jones’ food hall… the latter being stupidly expensive. I’ll have to try the homemade version. Sounds delicious.
I can feel my blood sugar levels rising just by taking in the delicious view.
Haha my work here is done 🙂
These are so beautiful – while I don’t have mandarin marmalade, I do have both homemade Seville orange and lemon-lavender marmalades on hand, so I think I will give them a go using one or both! I bet the egg yolk-rich pastry was amazing!
I am intrigued by your lemon and lavender marmalade that sounds really interesting!
Salivating. I love choc orange so imagine I would love these, too.
Oh my, they look wonderful Karen! The pastry (particularly in the final photo, which shows the most) looks just beautiful. Salted Caramel with the yummy caramel shards on top for me please – you know how I feel about marmalade! 😉
I thought that was just cumquats you didn’t like 🙂
I think the cumquat was possibly too reminiscent of marmalade – something I’ve never particularly enjoyed. Usually too bitter for my sweet tooth. 😲 Though it’s definitely one of those things that as an adult I need to keep trying… I’m sure I’ll like it one day!
Both recipes sound good, but I agree the chocolate would play off the mandarin marmalade beautifully.
That was a tough call with the egg yolks. Once I found a recipe where the instructions were different online than in the cookbook, and I actually emailed (author or publisher, I can’t remember) for verification. In that case, they wrote back and said “always trust the book”. But I thought – like you – that the website would offer a chance for correction. Glad it turned out anyway!