Coffee Ice Cream Tart (sans coffee)

One of the great things about Dorie Greenspan's book Baking from my Home to Yours, is that for most recipes, there's a little paragraph labeled "Playing around."  Here she provides suggestions for modifications to the recipe and encouragement to tweak the recipe to make it your own.

This week, Jessica of Domestic Deep Thought of the Day, chose Dorie's Coffee Ice Cream Tart for the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers.  I am not a fan of coffee but I am a fan of ice cream tarts, so I decided to play around a bit with this recipe.

I made half the crust recipe and two 4-inch tarts. The crust seemed a bit thick, but not unreasonably so.   After baking the tart shells, Dorie has you sprinkle on some finely chopped chocolate and spread it around as the chocolate melts.  This was fun! I used the lovely home-made vanilla ice cream that was still in the freezer and drizzled some hot fudge sauce on to decorate.

These little tarts were gorgeous and we had no difficulty eating them.  I think that I prefer Dorie's wonderful Sweet Tart Dough to this almond dough.  I really liked the layer of chocolate on top of the dough.  And I can easily imagine these being spectacular with mint chip ice cream.