Basic sweet shortcrust pastry recipe

Pastry making is one part of baking that intrigues me despite it being a time consuming and laborious task to manage. It's probably one of those duties that when performed right, it's a keeper for the rest of your baking career (well, unless if you stumbled upon a better method).

For me personally, I have tried various recipes which all yield good results but somehow does not scream the wow factor. Maybe I am being fussy here or maybe I am not doing the right thing. Eitherways, I will continue to look out for a winner of a recipe.

Last week, I had the opportunity to bake a chocolate tart to which, I immediately jumped at that opportunity because 1) its winter and so, the perfect weather for handling pastry 2) I have been wanting to try out a particular recipe.

This recipe belongs to the Masterchef Australia archives when Marco Pierre White was in town. I only used his pastry recipe (with minor alterations) but maybe next time, I shall use the entire recipe. I incorporated spice into the pastry for that extra bit of flavour and it worked out well.

Ingredients:
200g butter
80g icing
2 egg yolks
290g plain flour
10g chai powder
A tbsp of cold water

1. Cream butter and sugar in a food processor until it appears smooth and pale.
2. slowly add your egg yolks to the mixture whilst still mixing it.
3. Sift flour and chai powder together, slowly add it to the butter mixture. Add the water if needed for extra moisture.
4. Clingwrap and refridgerate for 2 hours. Roll out pastry into pastry tin before chilling it in the fridge for an extra hour.
5. Bake at 180C for 15 minutes, remove metal beans and drop temperature to 160C for 15 minutes.

As you can see, my chocolate filling is alright, not as smooth as I would have liked it to be. I did not use any cream based products to make it and relied heavily on the timing for mixing everything together. Raspberries work really well with chocolate despite me using frozen raspberries. Have crumbed the extra baked pastry pieces for garnish.

Not too bad overall and would give this another crack in the future!:)