The theme for this week for I Heart Cooking Clubs is Are You Calling Me a Tart? (Donna Hay sure knows how to make a great tart. And so can you.). The recipe I chose for this week was Cheat's Chocolate and Salted Caramel Tarts, and it can be found on page 180 in Donna Hay's Simple Dinners cookbook.
The ingredient list: thin plain round chocolate biscuits (cookies), caramel sauce, sea salt flakes, dark chocolate, and single cream.
I know, I know, I chose a chocolate recipe, seriously, me...a chocolate recipe? I am not a fan of chocolate. That said, I am trying to chose my theme recipes from this one cookbook, and as luck would have it, this is the one cookbook of hers that has very few tart recipes, only a couple, and one of them was one that I had already made before, so chocolate or not, I decided to choose this recipe for technique alone (and to get others to taste test it for me, which is really never any problem).
It's called "Cheat's..." because the recipe calls for the tart crust to be made from a single cookie. You choose a store-bought cookie, place it on a muffin tin cup, heat it in oven for 5 minutes to soften it, poke it down into the cavity of the muffin tin cup, let it cool, and there you have it, a nice little tart crust in a matter of minutes with no fuss and no mess.
The filling is easily made by heating the ingredients on the stovetop and spooning it into the little tart shell. The caramel sauce is spooned on top, and the whole thing gets a sprinkling of salt flakes.
I live with chocolate-loving guys so my husband Mark did the honors of taste testing and declared it "Excellent." As a side note, he ate one while waiting for dinner to cook as he didn't want to wait for dessert, so I guess you can use it for an appetizer as well, right? I would say that was a decent endorsement.
You can be assured I will use this little cookie crust technique again, it is so quick and easy, perfect for a last minute dessert to serve or take somewhere. I can also see this working very nicely for a non-chocolate cookie, and you can bet I'm going there next.
Really, for the recipe, just buy the book, I've made seven recipes from it so far, and each one worthy of the purchase price. Please visit the I Heart Cooking Clubs site to see what the others made, you just click on their photo entry and it links you to their post/recipe.