Madhouse recipe : Chocolate & hazelnut tart

Having had a rummage in the baking cupboard and found a bag of whole hazelnuts, I went looking for a recipe to use them up. The Food Network had a delicious-sounding recipe for Chocolate and Hazelnut Tart which sounded ideal - the Madhouse kids all love Nutella and I had visions of it tasting like that. I did change the recipe quite a bit though, so do go and have a look at the original.

I also had a box of Bisquick, an American "pancake and baking mix", so I decided to use some of that up too. I reduced the quantities of golden syrup and sugar a bit because it seemed a bit OTT in the original recipe - I used white chocolate too, which is sweeter than dark chocolate.

Chocolate & hazelnut tart

ingredients :

1 sheet of ready-made puff pastry

70g sugar

2 tbsp plain flour (I used Bisquick)

3 eggs, beaten

150g whole hazelnuts

220g dark chocolate chips (or 200g white chocolate & 3tbsp bitter cocoa powder)

150ml golden syrup

2 tbsp butter, melted

1 tsp vanilla essence

pinch of salt

1 shop-bought tart crust

Preheat the oven to 170°. Lay out the pastry in a pie tin and bake it blind while you prepare the filling.

Mix together the flour and sugar.

Break in the eggs and pour in the golden syrup, butter, vanilla, salt and hazelnuts. The original recipe says to chop them but I left them whole for extra crunch. The original recipe also called for 220g dark chocolate chips but all I had in the cupboard was 200g white chocolate. I (or rather Pierre) broke it into chunks and I added a few tablespoons of bitter cocoa powder to stop it being overly sweet.

I'd planned on breaking the chocolate into smaller pieces but Pierre was on a roll and threw it all in the bowl before I could stop him !

Pour the chocolatey mixture into the pie crust.

I couldn't help but laugh when I saw the huge squares of chocolate !

Bake in the oven for an hour. After 20 minutes, I gave it a good stir to help blend all the flavours once the chocolate had melted. The egg had just started to set but this didn't seem to matter because it came out perfectly at the end of the cooking time.

Leave to cool completely before slicing. It's very rich and chocolately, gorgeously gooey with a nice crunch from the pie crust and the hazelnuts. It didn't last long though !

As this started out as a way of using up a bag of hazelnuts, I'm adding it to this month's #KitchenClearout linky.