this tart is truly decadent. chocolate crust. chocolate filling. it's bursting with chopped milk and white chocolate and biscotti.

naturally, i took it as dessert to a dinner party featuring about eight types of cheese.

at this point in meal planning, you just have to give up and embrace overindulgence as the theme of your evening.

as beautiful as the tarts came out, they were pretty simple to put together. instead of many individual tarts (which is too much tart for one person anyway) i made one regular sized tart and one smaller "for two" tart.

well, it should have been for two, but the somm was away, so i enjoyed it myself. in several sittings. so as not to go into sugar shock.

first, a note about crusts. my crust dough did not come together the way the recipe described.

i failed at the task of smearing it together with the heel of my hand. thus, when i went to attack it with the rolling pin, i mostly succeeded in scattering crumbs about my rollpat. slash all over my kitchen.

just pressing it into the tart pans worked out great. and i love any excuse to avoid the rolling pin. it stresses me out.

and i am NOT in the kitchen to get stressed out.

this is also the reason i prefer graham cracker crusts to traditional pie crusts. fruit crumbles to fruit pies. they taste better and there is less anxiety about your butter staying cold in order to flake appropriately.

maybe baking with julia will help me overcome my fear of rolling in desserts.

see how lovely and scalloped and only slightly "rustic" that edge is? my crust was a total winner. like a cookie. not too buttery.

the filling also set up firm. maybe it was those eight (eight!) egg yolks. the best way to separate eggs is to crack them into your hand and let the slipperly slimy egg whites fall through your fingers. it feels so wrong, but works perfectly. way better than shuffling the poor yolk back and forth between raggedly egg shell halves.

there are nearly equal parts chocolate filling and mix-ins. i thought the biscotti was a strange ingredient but it kept a nice crunch in contrast to the harder bite of the chocolate chunks and silky smooth filling.

check out those chunks in action.

despite my previous admonishment to simply embrace the excess of this tart just as it is, i will now caution you to back away from the thought of serving it a la mode.

i was tempted. i had visions of overly complicated homemade ice cream flavors.

but really?

all it needs is a scoop of light as air, soft whipped cream. maybe with a hint of almond extract to pick up the anise of the chopped biscotti.

so good. to seem more lovely tarts and find a link to the recipe, check out tuesdays with dorie.