Chocolate Puff Pastry Disks (and what to do with them)

Chocolate puff pastry disks.

The name pretty much says it all, they are disks of chocolate puff pastry. To make them, bake a sheet of puff pastry. Just before you are ready to take it out of the oven, you brush it with watered down corn syrup. After the corn syrup stops bubbling, take it out. (This makes it sweeter and somewhat water proofed.) While it is still quite warm, cut it into the desired shape (i.e. rectangles for a chocolate napoleon) or, in this case, rounds. At this point, you can do a number of different things with them.

The Banana Chocolate Tartlet, without the finish.

In class we made Banana Chocolate Tartlets. This is a terribly misleading name; they are not really tarts. Instead, they are a plated dessert. Basically you start with a chocolate puff pastry disk, top it with slices of bananas, top them with some sugar, brulée the sugar with a blow torch, and finish with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and some chocolate sauce. If I liked bananas, I'm sure I would have liked this!

The finished tartlet.

Since we made these to eat with dinner and I don't like bananas, I made myself a variation on this, sans bananas. It was a chocolate disk topped with the lovely vanilla ice cream that the chef made and the equally lovely fresh chocolate sauce. Then I just sprinkled some of chocolate puff crumbs on top for good measure. It was delicious!

Yum!

I still had more disks left, so I took them home. I happened to have left over lemon curd, so I made a quasi-napoleon with lemon curd and raspberries sandwiched between two disks. In the center of the circle of berries was a small and completely hidden scoop of ice cream, for a sweet surprise. Yum.

As it turns out, lemon curd pairs wonderfully with chocolate puff pastry.