ExtraVeganza Raspberry-Chocolate Tart!

Hello, have you missed me?

I’m glad to be back on this Meatless Monday ~ or Plantaardig Maandag in Dutch. :) And even though I have a backlog of three bentos to post, I’m going to share a slice of the luxurious raspberry-chocolate pie I made for Easter!

It’s so good I will definitely make this over and over again! Mind you, I’m not even that much of a chocolate lover… But the flavours of this torte complement each other so well: a sugarless cake bottom with bitter-sweet (FairTrade) chocolate and the tartness of fresh raspberries. Need I say more? YUM!

It’s originally a recipe from the Belgian Vegetarian Association EVA but instead of making 6 small pastries I decided to make one big pie (with some other small adaptations). So far I have only made three recipes from the EVA website: birthday brownies (served 3 times), marvellous mayonnaise (I never go without) and now this tart. Obviously they are all a hit! So I guess I should take an even better look at that site. :)

Now the baking of this pie does take a bit of patience… It’s not a lot of work (!), but there’s waiting time in between stages. Personally, I rather saw that as an advantage! I made the cake, which is the most time-consuming part, the night before (or actually 2 ;), the chocolate filling on Easter morning and I added the topping -raspberries and powdered sugar- just before serving at teatime. That was a fun job to do with our little helper cousin.

Of course the adults decided to have some prosecco wine instead of tea with this indulgent treat. :P

Raspberry-Chocolate Tart

Serves 10.
Dutch translation at the bottom of this post.

Ingredients

Pastry shell:

• 250 g all-purpose flour
• 125 g soy butter
• a pinch of salt
• 1-4 tbsp soy milk

Chocolate filling:

• 300 g dark chocolate (vegan and preferably FairTrade, like Tony’s Chocolonely), broken into small parts
• 50-75 g soy butter
• 150 ml vanilla soy milk
• 2 tbsp maple syrup
• 60 g raspberry jam

Finishing touch:

• 500 g raspberries (extra if they are really big)
• powdered sugar

Preparation

Stage 1: pastry shell
Can be made up to 2 days in advance.

1. Grease a 25 cm pastry tin and/or cover the bottom with baking paper.
2. Mix flour, salt and ‘butter’ (125 g) by hand to make a crumbly pastry dough.
3. Add soy milk spoon by spoon until the mixture holds together well, like shortbread dough.
4. Roll out pastry dough, forming a circle big enough to cover bottom and sides of your pastry tin. I cover my working counter with a flexible silicon baking sheet, put the dough on, cover with baking paper and use my rolling pin over that.
5. Put the flattened dough into the tin – here’s where a silicon sheet comes in handy! :)
6. Press well into the sides: you can use a bit of the dough in cling-wrap to do this easily. Cut off any extra dough.
7. Use a fork to make holes in the bottom and put the dough into the refrigerator until it feels firm. This takes at least 30 minutes – I just went out to do my holiday grocery shopping. :) You can put it in the fridge if you’re pressed for time.

Baking

1. Preheat oven to 190°C.
2. Cover the pastry dough with a little baking paper (recycle the piece you used for rolling the dough) and fill with pie weights or whatever you use for blind baking.
3. Prebake in the oven for 25-30 minutes: keep a close eye on from 15 minutes onwards. Remove weights and paper and bake for another 15 minutes until light golden.
4. Take from the oven and let it cool.

Stage 2: filling

1. Melt the chocolate Bain-Marie on low temperature (you know how to do this, right?).
2. Add butter bit by bit (keep stirring to mix well), vanilla soy milk and maple syrup. It may seem that the chocolate is forming clumps but everything will be all right if you keep stirring carefully.
3. When everything is mixed well and creamy you can start filling your pie! First get the pastry shell out of the tin though. :)
4. Cover the bottom of the pie with raspberry jelly.
5. Add the chocolate filling.
6. Let it cool at room temp for approximately 2 hours (or more).

Stage 3: finish

1. When you’re ready to eat you can layer the chocolate with fresh raspberries.
2. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve.

Stage 4: Bon appétit!

Advertentie

In the Mood for a Read-a-thon (Easter Sunday Salon 04-04-2010)

I began this Easter Sunday reading in bed. Cuddling up to Mr Gnoe with cats & coffee; can’t get any cosier than that :) Yeah well, the dwarf hamster prefers to stay in her cage ;)

I’m still enjoying Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Only a hundred pages to go until the end of the book. So far my favourite stories are The Ice Man and The Seventh Man. The latter I read at least a week ago, but yesterday I feared the ocean I saw in Nowhere Boy because of it… :\

You might remember I was already reading ‘Blind Willow’ during my previous Sunday Salon 3 weeks ago. I don’t seem to get much reading done these days; I’m also slowly progressing in Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book (see below). Still, there’s no need to worry, because there’s a new 24 hour read-a-thon coming up next week! I had great fun in October, even though I got so over-excited I really couldn’t get much reading done… LOL Why don’t you join us this time?

Things I’ll do differently:

• I’ll start a few hours early because 2pm is not a good time to begin the read-a-thon.
• Compensation for my early start will be taken Saturday night: I’m going to see butoh dancer Takateru Kudo perform Go-Zarashi.
• I will not put my laptop directly beside my reading chair…
• I will check in every two hours on the dot so I can do some cheering, join in mini challenges and get the community feeling, but won’t get too distracted. Maximum pc time allowed: 15-20 minutes.
• Mini-challenge entries will be short (at first; I might make ‘em more fancy after the read-a-thon has ended).
• Maybe I’ll even let Mr Gnoe guard my new iPhone because it’s such a distracting device ;) LOL
• I’m not buying any books especially for the read-a-thon; there’s enough on my shelves to choose from.
• I have no need for excessive snacks & sweets… Really I don’t. Cross my heart and hope to die.

Although I’m free to pick anything of my liking of the shelves, I actually have a small pile of books set aside already. Last time I really benefited by the advice of some ‘old-timers’ to have a selection of different genres at hand. So my book stack contains novels and short stories, fiction next to non-fiction in both English and Dutch, plus comics and a graphic novel. I even have some audio books available for when my eyes get too tired :)

DA BOOX:

• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami; or, if finished:
• a choice of the following short stories: De arm (One Arm) by Yasunari Kawabata, The January Man by David Mitchell, Helen and Julia by Sarah Waters
• Het hoofdkussenboek van Sei Shōnagon (The Pillow Book), Sei Shōnagon; just the journal entries to keep up with my read-along
• Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger
• Dromen van China (The China Lover), Ian Buruma
• Geketende democratie: Japan achter de schermen (‘Democracy in Chains: Behind the Scenes of Japan‘), correspondent Hans van der Lugt: a belated birthday present — that’s what happens when you flee the country at the actual day: gifts pouring in for a while afterwards ;)
• Mutts: Dog-eared, Patrick McDonnell
• Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story, Ari Folman & David Polonsky

So, how do like my ‘short’ list? :) And do you have any good advice for the read-a-thon?

Bookish posts

This week’s bookish posts on Graasland:

• My First Favourite Book about The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford
• ‘A Steam Whistle in the Middle of the Night‘ a selection of Haruki Murakami’s short stories that haven’t been translated to English yet (Hello Japan’s Murakami March entry).

The Pillow Book

Arrived at entry: 41/41
Entries read since last time: 10

It’s been a while since I last read in Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book and not much comes to mind when I try to think of something to say about it. I guess it’s not making much of an impression :( Maybe the pace is too slow for me (not really getting a feel for the narrator), or or it might have to do with my recent discovery of preferring plot-driven books. I will admit I’m looking at 7 post-its sticking out of my volume: quotes that I should copy into my own journal but that I haven’t gotten round to. Once I’ve done so, maybe I’ll have more to say.

Unfortunately I had to cancel my visit to the Sketches from the Pillow Book theater play in Amsterdam. But blogging-buddy-to-be Marion went and wrote a short post about it. Feels a bit like I’ve been there anyway ;)

Now, back to my leisurely Easter Sunday. I’m going to read some more, have a nice dinner of cannelloni and mandarin tiramisu dessert (recipe will follow later), and will finish watching the first season of Damages. What are you doing today?

The Sunday Salon is a virtual gathering of booklovers on the web, where they blog about bookish things of the past week, visit each others weblogs, oh — and read ;)