Chocolate & Peanut Butter Pretzel Tart

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and I feel like the 4oz Kitchen has been a bit neglected, so August is going to be The Month of Lots of Baking. Today’s recipe for Chocolate & Peanut Butter Pretzel Tartlets is actually one of my all-time favorite desserts from Emily Hilliard at Nothing in the House (Have you been there yet? Go there. Seriously. You’ll never want to leave). I've made it a few times over the past couple of years, and it's never not been a home run. This simple tart is filled with creamy peanut butter swirled into rich chocolate ganache, and the crust is packed with pretzels. So you’ve got your sweet meeting your salty, your creamy meeting your crunchy, and good luck putting down that fork. At this point I should confess that I’ve never actually gotten to the point of using a fork with this tart because whenever it’s in the house, my impulse for immediate gratification becomes overpowering and I go at it bare handed. But you get the idea. 

Now I know it’s summer, which means peaches are in season along with myriad other fresh ingredients. However, a few days ago, I went to sleep on July 31, and something terrible happened overnight.  August reared its ugly head, and the inevitable end of summer vacation began looming in a very real and ominous way on my mental horizon. In such a bleak state of affairs, I didn’t need fruit, I needed comfort food – so here we are.

Like I said before, this is not a new recipe; I’ve made it a handful of times in the past, but this time I made a deliberate decision to be more liberal with my application of butter, and this was a good choice.

For instance, I used a good half of this stick of butter on the six waiting tart dishes along with a light dusting of flour. Not only did it make removing the tarts from their dishes a painless process, but I feel confident that the flavor of the crust was improved slightly as well.

Here’s my dough ball, comprised half of flour and half of crushed pretzels; it turned out to be a nice mix of sweet and salty. In the past I’d used a rolling pin to crush my pretzels by hand, but this time around I used the food processor, which turned out to give me a better consistency for the crust. While you can see that a few chunks of pretzel remained, which was good for flavor and texture, the finer pretzel powder seemed to help the dough hold together better overall.

Unlike other, stressful tart crust experiences, this one behaved impeccably as I rolled it out between two sheets of plastic wrap. I think the recipe called for waxed paper here, but I like to be able to see exactly how my crust is holding up, so I went with a more transparent alternative.

Once the dough was about 15 inches in diameter, I cut out circles using my trusty martini glass (the circumference of which makes the perfect mini-tart-dish-sized circle)  and pieced the crust into my waiting, (heavily buttered) dishes.

The original recipe makes a 12-inch tart, so I had more than enough dough. If I’d had more tart dishes I could have gotten at least two more crusts.

Here’s the next moment of extra-buttery goodness in this recipe. For the first 20 minutes they’re in the oven, the crusts need to be covered with aluminum foil that’s been buttered on the underside.  I promise, you guys, there are few little things in life more subtly satisfying than smearing soft lumps of butter over a smooth surface. I especially recommend foregoing the spatula and using your hands.

After my crusts were baked and cooled, preparing the ganache was a simple “heat the cream, pour it over your really tasty Ghirardelli dark chocolate chips, wait 5 minutes, whisk, and keep lovin’ life” kind of thing. The peanut butter just needed to be warmed a little to melt. Pour your warm, gooey fillings into your crusts, swirl around, and voilà: dessert to die for.

These tarts taste just like my favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor, Chubby Hubby. This ice cream was also our go-to snack in college when my roommates and I needed some emergency stress reduction via food therapy, so no wonder I started craving it the morning after having my first school-related anxiety dream (wherein I found myself in front of a classroom of first graders, I was late to a student government meeting, and a tornado raged outside the window – yikes). So I’m going to take a step back, take a few deep breaths, and savor the last weeks of summer while I work my way through a few of these bad boys. 

Post Script: Part of me does feel a little guilty for neglecting summer fruit season though, so check back soon for some peach-inspired, herby-spicy goodness.