Teeny Tiny Tarlettes

Not a great day in the pastry school neighborhood today; perhaps we should blame it on the rain. Along with the teeny tiny tartlettes came tremendous team tension and so instead of frolicking through the day, I merely tried to survive along with 24 perfect wee tartlettes.

Prior to the tiny tarts we made something called a breton. Now I'm not sure where bretons are from, probably France, but they are not a picnic to put together. They use a dough that even at the best of times, with the best chef's hands (seriously, our chef was recently voted one of the ten best pastry chefs in the USA), they crumble. It was an incredibly soft dough that almost seemed to ooze butter and it was darn near unworkable -- instead of rolling it, ours had to be pressed into the pan. On the inside of the breton was a filling made of caramel and walnuts and then it was topped with yet another layer of unworkable dough. I must say that the end result was not very pretty. In fact, due to the grey hair that the breton gave me, I refused to photograph it out of spite. Don't be sad though, it really wasn't pretty.

Now for the tarts. Our team was assigned two flavors to make, raspberry and gianduja. In case you might not know, as I didn't, gianduja or as I spelt it in my notes, jon-do-ya, is basically a chocolate hazelnut mixture. It's kind of like a block of nutella and it is delicious. For the tarts we rolled or rather we pounded with our rolling pins, pate sablee dough out until it was see-through thin. Then we very carefully set out our wee tiny tart pans under the dough and gently nudged the dough into all the nooks and crannies of the pan. We baked the tarts just until they had a touch of color and then let them cool while we prepared our fillings. For the raspberry, we whipped some of our buttercream till it was soft then added some raspberry puree. We heated some raspberry jam to use as glaze and put it into a little cornet and then piped our buttercream into the tart shells and glazed them with the jam. For the gianduja, I made a ganache with the gianduja and a little cream and we piped that into the little shells and then topped them with a gold-powder dipped roasted hazelnut. It was a lot of work for a lot of little tarts but they were all quite lovely when we finished.


See how tiny!


Gianduja tartlette


Raspberry buttercream tartlette


The whole lot of 'em