Chocolate Torte

This weekend we went to a fireworks party and had dinner with some friends! My task was to bring dessert that would go with home made orange ice-cream! I decided that chocolate torte would be the best option!

I looked through a few recipes online and decided to go with this Gordon Ramsey torte.

So I started by making the pastry. The recipe makes quite a lot of pastry and there were quite a few people to cater for, so I decided to use a larger tart tin and make a slightly shallower torte than the picture on the website! The pastry was relatively simple to make, it came together quite nicely and I was careful not to overwork it. I chilled it in the fridge for an hour before rolling it out. I rolled out the pastry and in hindsight I think I should have rolled it a bit thinner, but it wasn't too bad. I think it needs to be no thicker than a £1 coin and I think in some places it was probably a bit thicker than this. A trick I've picked up for getting the pastry nicely into the tin is to take out the loose bottom then place the pastry on top of this and fold in the sides so that the bottom of the tin can then be placed back into the tin and the pastry unfolded back over the top (Thanks Mary Berry!). This always seems to work better for me than rolling out the pastry and trying to lay it over the top of the tin. I then got a bit carried away and instead of reading the recipe properly, I used the edge of the tin to trim the pastry. The recipe said I should leave the pastry about a cm over the edge then blind bake it for 20 mins, then trim the sides. WHOOPS! So my shallower torte ended up being EVEN shallower as the pastry then shrank away from the sides. I also pricked the bottom of my torte case which it didn't mention to do!

I then popped the case in the oven for 20 mins with some uncooked rice in the bottom, then took out the rice and baked it for another 6 minutes to get the bottom brown. The first 20 mins of cooking with the rice in stops the bottom of the case from rising up, then after 20 minutes its cooked enough that the bottom won't rise up any more so you are safe to take up the beans/rice and get the surface of the tart a bit brown.


I took the case out of the oven to cool, and got on with making the chocolate filling. This was also really easy. I just whisked together the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract, broke up all of the chocolate into a separate bowl. Then heated up the milk and cream to boiling and poured this over the chocolate. This melted the chocolate, I then whisked in the egg and sugar mix and got ready to pour it into the torte case. This was probably the hardest part of the process as my torte case was so shallow.
 Here is the filled case in the oven:

And here it is after about 30mins in the oven. Nicely set with a lovely shiny top! I left it to cool in the tin over night then the next morning had a look at it!

I grated some dark chocolate over the top to decorate. Instead of using a grater, I use a potato peeler and just 'peel' the chocolate down the side of the bar to do this which is a bit easier than grating!

I then left the cake for a few hours and finally took it out of the tin just before serving. As you can see in the slightly blurry picture below that the torte is quite thin but in the end this was ok as it is very rich and not that sweet as its mainly dark chocolate. It definitely went well with the homemade ice cream which added a nice fresh tang with the lime and orange. TA - DAH! Finished chocolate torte!