Chestnut Tart with Dark Chocolate Ganache

This chestnut tart with dark chocolate ganache sits on top of a pecan shortbread crust and is topped with a lightly sweetened vanilla cream . . .

The Perfect Winter Treat

I just love roasted chestnuts. So imagine my dismay when I learned that my mother doesn’t care for their texture! Very well, I would win her over to the roasted chestnut cause another way. Using a French trick I learned for the babies. If she doesn’t like the texture at first, I will puree it! Let her learn to like the flavor, then re-introduce it as a solid food. Why shouldn’t this toddler strategy work on my septuagenarian mother?

The game is on. (She just doesn’t know it yet.)

I had not really heard of or thought about chestnut tarts before the day I began thinking about this important family question of how to hook my mom onto chestnuts. But in my mind, it sounded like something that could definitely be delicious, so I googled it, and very quickly found myself salivating over Mont Blanc recipes.

For the uninitiated, a Mont Blanc is an Italian dessert named for the highest peak in the Alps. It typically includes a chestnut cream plus meringue or whipped cream on top of a cake or tart base. It’s meant to look like the mountain itself. It sounded amazing and I was sold. And so began a couple of weeks of rapid fire chestnut desserts. My squeeze-back-into-pre-pregnancy-jeans diet is going amazing by the way.

When this obsession started, I had just completed making some of my traditional brown butter pecan shortbread cookies. The dough was chilling in the refrigerator. And so I thought — why shouldn’t I make that into crust? So I warmed some of it back up to room temp, shaped it in a tart mold, baked it for about 15 minutes, and voila! We have instant delicious crust.

Next I thought, why not try putting a little chocolate ganache on the bottom and then layer some of the chestnut cream that I keep on-hand for impromptu cold-weather crepes (did I mention how great the diet is going yet?). If the ganache is at the bottom, that should keep the crust crisp. Then comes the chestnut cream. I could keep things simple and top it all of with some whipped cream and shaved chocolate. I will admit, when I was first trialing the flavors to make sure it worked, I did in fact use Redi whip as my topping. How else to use up the absurdly sized Costco 3-packs of Redi whip my husband keeps buying over the holidays!

It truly was an Hallelujah moment.

I played around with making cute individual tartlets or one large tart (pictured above). It all comes down to how much crust you want with your tart. The individual tartlets will have a bit more crust-to-filling ratio and were my preferred option, but both were delicious.

Chestnut Cream

You have two options here. You can either use a premade chestnut cream (for instance, this one which is pre-packaged to make your piping life much easier. It is also very delicious).

I used the store-bought one (pictured above) on my first attempt, and I thought it turned out really great. Some recipes mention that store-bought chestnut cream is too sweet – but because this tart includes a bittersweet dark chocolate ganache right below the chestnut cream, the sweetness of the chestnut cream actually works quite well and is not overpoweringly sweet. It comes out just about right.

I also tried a version where I made the chestnut cream myself (pictured above). I used a mixture of pre-cooked chestnuts, cream, vanilla, powdered sugar, and water. It tasted alright, but I thought the flavor came out much, much too mild. I also didn’t like the creaminess of it (weird, I know). I think the creaminess somehow masked the flavor of the roasted chestnut.

If I make this again, I will try roasting the chestnuts myself to make sure they’re as fresh and fragrant as possible. I’ll also eliminate the cream for a water-based chestnut paste. I may also add a bit of rum or some other liquor to enhance the chestnut flavor.

For the recipe below, I tried to keep things as simple as possible. Therefore, I recommend just using the store bought chestnut cream. I personally want to continue to experiment with making homemade chestnut cream, but given the pain in the butt of making your own chestnut cream, I really can’t say it’s worth the effort right now. The results would have to be absolutely mind-blowing to justify the work of roasting, peeling, pureeing, and piping your own chestnut cream. Did I mention that the store bought one comes in a little bag for super easy application?

On to the recipe below!

Print