Chocolate Raspberry Linzer Torte

 My girlfriends were coming over for a light summer dinner.  And to watch a movie we'd all been wanting to see, the French 70's classic La Piscine with the incredibly gorgeous Alain Delon in his prime. With that to look forward to, a preemptive chocolate fix was in order!

I love making tarts for an easy dessert that looks fancy enough to make any meal special. I'd had my eye on making a Linzer torte from Anna Olsen's YouTube channel, but that will be for another day because it's a recipe for using blood oranges. And as I said, with Delon on the menu we needed chocolate!

I found this recipe from the Nestle Toll House website, modestly called verybestbaking.com.  I liked the look of the recipe, I liked that it uses a press-in dough that doesn't need chilling, and I liked that I "happened" to have all the ingredients at hand.  

This recipe was developed for using their chocolate chips, but I used Ghirardelli 60% cacao bittersweet chocolate instead. I knew it would yield a much better flavor.

The tart came together super easily. The only glitch is that it would be better to reserve a bit more than 1/3 of the dough for the lattice on top and it would be better to roll it out to a 10 or 11 inch disk instead of a 9-inch disk.  At 9 inches across, the strips of dough weren't all quite long enough to reach the sides of the tart pan and baked up rather thick, and the bottom crust was also a tad thick.  It wasn't a problem to patch up and lengthen the strips of lattice that were too short, but it ruined the look of the tart.

This recipe doesn't call for putting an egg wash on the top crust. As a result the baked tart looks matte and a bit dry. And overall, the crust is dry. However, I found it looked quite attractive like this. In looking at the lattice, I see that I should have spaced out the long strips a bit more, and placed 4 in our direction and 4 in the other, instead of 5 and 3. But when making the lattice, the dough was getting soft very very quickly, even though it wasn't particularly hot in the kitchen, and I was pressed for time and didn't want to have to wait while it firmed up in the fridge. But it's something to pay attention to next time.

The tart baked up in about 43 minutes, since my oven is running hot.  

As far as the taste goes I thought it was very good. The filling bakes up as a soft chocolate with notes of raspberry that strike just the right balance, and I enjoyed the drier taste of the crust. In contrast to a buttery tart or pie crust the drier crust, together with the filling, give this tart an authentic linzer-cookie taste!  

I enjoyed making and eating this tart. I recommend it and will certainly make it again.

Chocolate Raspberry Linzer Torte


La Piscine
 with Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin


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