Daring Baker's Challenge: Caramel Milk Chocolate tart

Reading the recipe title this month I was happy! I adore caramel and when I "have" to eat chocolate I prefer milk chocolate; this was so going to be my tart. Original recipe comes from Eric Kayser's Sweet & Savory Tarts. Second reading and visualizing how the tart was going to look had me thinking: Mars bar in tart shape.

Chiching! Program break for a little explanation here: our European Mars bar is known in the US as Milky Way, whereas our Milky Way is your 3 Musketeers, our 3 Musketeers is discontinued long ago and has made a reappearance under the name Curly Wurly which is your Marathon. Your Mars bar? Doesn't exist here... or might be disguised as a Snickers bar with peanuts not almonds. Confused yet? Moohahaha (Evidence can be found here and here) Why all this? Because the good founders of Mars once divided the world in two after a little argument (dad and son didn't get along together for a moment).... That's global thinking avant la lettre folks! Mars bar was invented in the UK, based on the US Milky Way. At one point of time the companies were merged again and there we were, millions of marketing money had gone into branding.... resulting in status quo.
Chiching! End of break, back to the program on hand.

{Gosh! When I digress, I digress good 'n plenty! We were discussing Daring Baker's August Challenge. Milk Chocolate Caramel tart.} OK.

I'll leave the recipe and directions to our wonderful hosts this month: Veronica at Veronica's Testkitchen and Patricia at Technicolor Kitchen and just mention the ingredients here so you'll know what was going on.

Ingredients shortbread dough:
1 cup (250g ) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (150 g) confectioners’ sugar
½ cup (50 g) ground hazelnuts
2 level teaspoons (5 g) ground cinnamon (optional, omitted entirely forewarned by fellow DB's)
2 eggs
4 ½ cups (400 g) cake flour
2 ½ teaspoons (10 g) baking powder
1 ½ tablespoons (10 g) cocoa powder (used our Dutch Droste cocao)
Let us go to the bottom of this and introduce you to another term: P&P as in Patch and Push. I expected the dough to firm up by the rest in the fridge, instead it soaked up every available moisture and came out wet, wet, wet.
I couldn't roll this dough even if I wanted to, and believe me, I wanted it bad! Wasn't going to work. I tried rolling between plastic sheets, rolling between paper, flouring.... Hence the term P&P 'coz that's what I did. Even wetted my hands to will it into the waiting pan! No crimping the edges. Crimping edges, did she say crimping edges? What the f** was she thinking?

Blind baked the shortbread layer, and it came out rather moon landscape-ish, the bottom had risen a bit but not alarmingly so and since it was going to be covered by a caramel layer I wasn't worried. I did use some words however. Nasty words.

Ingredients caramel layer:
1 cup (200 g) granulated sugar
1 cup (250 g) heavy cream (30-40% butterfat) or crème fraiche (used our regular whipping cream)
¼ cup (50 g) butter
2 whole eggs
1 egg yolk
2 ½ tablespoons (15 g) flour
Caramel was next. Some debate going on using wet vs dry method, I used dry as I almost always do and all went well. Of course when adding the cream to the caramel the whole pan protested loudly to the point of exploding and the melted sugar crumbled and hardened again, no worries there. Make sure you stand away from the pan and let the low heat do it's work and stir stir stir! The cream will heat up and melt the sugar again, lumps disappear and you'll be rewarded by a creamy caramel. Then add butter, I did this off the heat, the remaining temperature will melt the butter nicely in the caramel. Combining the eggs and yolk with the flour was easy, to mix it into the still hot caramel was, let's say, risqué..... First I poured a little stream of caramel into the egg mixture, all the while whisking like crazy, (in Dutch it's called: "making family" in English?) exhale, no scrambled eggs!! Safe to stir egg mixture in the caramel then, resulting in a delicious scrumptious sauce.
Take a spoon and eat. Sorry, slip of the fingers.

Instead after having a spoon or two, three maybe, slap the DH hands, have another spoon, pour in the waiting blind baked crust(s), bake for another scant 15 minutes and let cool.

Ingredients milk chocolate mousse:
1 ¼ cups (300 g) whipping cream
½ lb (250 g) milk chocolate (used Callebaut milk chocolate chips)
Meanwhile melt chocolate in another pan (low low low heat or bain Marie but please make sure there is not a drop of water spilling in the pan or you will be punished with grainy chocolate mush) and whip some more cream to peaks (yes, even more cream). Now here comes a tricky part, we needed to create chocolate mousse but between chocolate being warm and cream being whipped how to proceed? I decided to offer some of the cream to make a "family" again and stir, to prevent to shock the chocolate and deflate the cream. Then I folded one into the other, loosing some of the air in the process but not all.

This is where I decided to allow some freewheeling. I mean, there was a lot of caramel sauce and a lot of chocolate mousse and just this one shallow tart pan to fill. I feared overflowing so somewhere in between the above mentioned I fixed (P&P) another shortbread crust. (The amount of dough was said to be enough to make three shells) Divided caramel between the two, let cool for a bit and tried to pipe the mousse.

No way! Too soft to pipe, too eager to finish, not patient enough to let the mousse cool sufficiently, dreading the moment where the mousse would be too stiff to pipe at all. So I smoothed out my piping and decided to comb instead.

Which resulted in a nice Japanese Garden.

Tranquility in chocolate.

Verdict: 16 people ate the cakes, all but two were positive and liked it. The one? That was me, but I believe you immediately when you say I was biased. You know, I tried and sampled all the components in their not-assembled state and I expected the combined end product to exceed the individual parts of the sum. Like 1+1+1 = 4

I don't think it did. Somewhere between crust and layers some texture was missed. May be the crust too soft to bring out the smooth layers? I cannot say. All I can say is: make that caramel!!
Oh and check out my fellow Daring Bakers on this blogroll! Can't wait to see their stories.