Chocolate tart with orange pastry

A couple of weeks ago Y & I went to Bath for the weekend, and it was in Bath that I purchased my solid bar of Willie's World Class 100% cacao. The cacao had been sitting on a shelf in its gleaming gold wrapping challenging me to use it ever since. I trawled the internet looking for recipes to use the cacao. I found a forum of people begging the BBC for a copy of a recipe for Willie's chocolate tart with orange pastry. They don't appear ever to have found the recipe. It's nowhere on the internet, and even people who own Willie's book tell me the recipe isn't in there. Of course, my curiousity was piqued and nothing other than the chocolate tart with orange pastry would do. But alas, I would have to go it alone. Sans recipe.

I made Gordon Ramsay's sweet flan pastry from his book "Great British Pub Food". I have previously detailed how to make this pastry when I made a strawberry tart a few weeks ago (click here for the step by step guide). Whilst kneading the pastry I added the zest of one orange.

Whilst the pastry shell was cooking I started to make the chocolate filling. In a saucepan I melted the entire 180g bar of 100% cacao (roughly chopped) with approximately 500ml of double cream and 3 tablespoons of caster sugar (if you're using a dark chocolate with a lower percentage of cocoa, e.g. 70%, I would use less double cream and less sugar).I stirred this constantly over a low-medium heat until smooth.

Having cooked the pastry at about 180 degrees for 15 minutes blind, and then an extra 5 minutes not-blind (or would you say visually able?) I trimmed the pastry edges and poured the chocolate mixture into the tart shell. I then baked the tart for a further 15-20 minutes until almost set, but still a little wobbly. My oven loves to burns things (and takes particular care to target its wrath on the things that have taken me the most time and effort, such as pastry) so I put a sheet of foil over my tart for the last 10 minutes to stop the tart edges burning.

Once the tart came out of the oven I left it to cool and set.

I served the chocolate tart for friends tonight with sliced strawberries and double cream. The tart itself has a beautiful texture and I really liked the orange pastry. I would definitely suggest serving with something sweet like strawberries, cream or maybe a raspberry coulis, to balance the bitterness of the chocolate tart (it's definitely not a creamy milk chocolate filling, although you could add more cream and sugar if this is what you're after). I think this a rather sophisticated tart (somewhat of an oxymoron perhaps) as it isn't your typical sickly sweet rich chocolate. This is one tart I rather enjoyed.