I think I am in love with pastry cream (or creme patisserie) and I wanted to try making it again. But this time, I went with chocolate! I also have a new tart pan that has been sitting around waiting for me to use it! The poor thing has been here since before Christmas!

All the recipes I used are from my Baking: From My Home to Yours cookbook by Dorie Greenspan. Josh bought me this cookbook for Christmas and it has seen a lot of use!

This was a pat-into-the-pan tart crust. I know I made this crust a little too thick at the bottom of the fluted edge, but this was my first tart crust. I used a sweet tart crust recipe.

Here is my tart crust after baking. It ended up a little darker than I wanted. But I have a good reason for missing the timer on the oven for this!

The reason: I was outside with 4 of my kids, my mother-in-law, and 2 of my nephews and we were chasing two chickens!  We have about 7 neighbors whose yards touch our property. One particular neighbor has a LOT of chickens. Their yard used to slope down to a fence that borders our side yard. Then they leveled their backyard and built a high retaining wall and then put another fence on top of that. The retaining wall is incredibly ugly and blocks out the sun, but there isn’t much we can do about it. Anyway, when they did all that work, we thought that our chicken problems were over. But no, somehow their chickens were still finding a way to escape into our yard! Yesterday, two of their chickens were in our yard and couldn’t find a way back to their home. My kids and nephews had a great time trying to chase them out of the yard but it didn’t work. There was no where for them to go! Since I was outside, I didn’t hear the timer beep when my crust was done.

Josh talked to the neighbor last night and they said they would come around to pick up their chickens. I’m not sure if they did or not.

I didn’t get any pictures of my custard as I was making it but here is the assembled tart. I used a recipe for chocolate pastry cream. I did have to push the custard through a sieve before I refrigerated it. This cream wasn’t quite as smooth as the vanilla pastry cream I made a few weeks ago.

The spatula I used to smooth the custard into the tart crust was full of chocolaty goodness after I was done. My oldest son and I almost had a fight over the spatula. He won.

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The custard was divine. Pudding from a box just doesn’t have the same oomph as this stuff!

I tried to make an Italian meringue frosting two days ago but it didn’t turn out quite like I wanted. My kids didn’t seem to mind it though and were eating it by itself. I used the frosting to make Marshmallow Fluff Brownies, but I had a lot of it left over! So I decided to use it on this tart as decoration along with some cocoa powder. Whipped cream would have been better, I think. I didn’t like the texture of the frosting.

My dislike for the frosting didn’t stop me from eating my slice though!

-Lynn