Summer Sweets No.4 - Salted Caramel S’mores Tart

Because caramel makes everything better

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Hello! Happy Friday

Big week this week, we finally got permission to get started with our house renovation, something we’ve been anxiously waiting for over the last few months. For those of you new around here let me quickly bring you up to date. I have lived, and rented, in London for almost 15 years and for most of that time have been saving up to one day buy a house and therefore, most importantly, finally have a kitchen that is all mine. No landlord making weird choices about kitchen design, but something I get to design, that I get to decorate, exactly how I want it. In other words, my dream. At the start of the year we moved into our little disaster. I say disaster because it needs so much work, but I am actually incredibly thankful, by taking on so much work we were able to afford to buy the house in the first place and I don’t take that for granted. The house hasn't been touched in maybe 30 years so when we moved in, it really felt like stepping back in time, the 70’s wallpaper really helping sell the image. We have slowly started to tackle the smaller jobs, like stripping wallpaper, clearing the wild and overgrown garden (I have a garden!) all in preparation for the day we can finally start on the real work. At the moment, the kitchen is the biggest area of concern, nowhere in the house shows its age more clearly, it’s an incredibly depressing room. It’s dark and small, terribly designed and seriously lacking workspace; unsurprisingly it is not the ideal space for developing recipes, but I am making it work as best as I can. The plan is to maximise the space we already have, keeping building costs as low as possible, but to also extend slightly, to change our slim galley kitchen into something more functional.

this picture does not at all convey the feel of the space, its so much darker and smaller feeling in person

We are still a few months away from getting started and the headaches and stress are sure to continue to build, but I am so excited to turn my ideas into reality and to reach the end point, when I can finally turn on my new oven, in my new kitchen, for the very first time and christen my kitchen with its first recipe. As we get going I intend to do an occasional posts on designing my dream kitchen so, if there any things you might find interesting, please let me know. I think it will be fun to document the process and I want to bring you along for the ride. But for now, something altogether more delicious.

Sometimes I want something sophisticated, something with interesting flavour combinations, with elegance, to pretend for a moment I am a fancy type of person. Today is not that day. Today we are sticking to good old fashioned flavours, tested and true, crowd favourites. I am talking about the forever favourite combo of chocolate and caramel. The initial idea was to make a version of a millionaires shortbread but transforming it into a simple tart but I couldn’t stop there. I needed to change things up a bit. I ended up with a mash up, a cross between a millionaires shortbread and a s’more.

The tart starts with a relatively classic crust, made with either crushed graham crackers or digestives. To bind the crumbs the traditional method is to add butter and a little sugar. The addition of sugar might seem strange considering the cookies are already sweet but actually it’s included for a functional reason. When you bake a crust like this the sugar actually helps everything to hold together. In this recipe I like to take this idea even further, so along with the sugar I also add an egg white. When the tart shell bakes, the egg white further binds everything together as it sets with the heat of the oven. I like this method because it prevents an overly dry and crumbly tart shell, something all too common when using a biscuit base.

The fillings are a classic salted caramel and a beautiful chocolate ganache, made with a mix of dark and milk chocolate, for something with rich cocoa notes but also the creaminess that milk chocolate can bring. The final element is a brown sugar Swiss meringue which is torched with a kitchen blow torch. I am sure I don’t need to tell you how good this combination is; a crunchy toasty base, a rich salted caramel, rich ganache and a burnished meringue topping, it’s the stuff dreams are made of, well my dreams at least.

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