About three weeks ago J’s mom was in town and J was making pad thai for dinner. I wanted to make a nice dessert to go along with it and I had all of the ingredients since my caramel peanut brownie disaster, and thought that this would be nice after a spicy peanutty dish. I adored the picture of the tart of page 356 and I had just bought a 9 inch tart pan at IKEA a few weeks back so when I got home early that day I broke out my bake box and got started. Dorie recommends using the Sweet Tart Dough of page 444 and it was buttery and delicious. If you make this you need to make sure to definitely bake it until it’s done. I think mine took about 40-45 to bake and get the edges slightly crisp. In her recipe for the caramel she says to add the butter after the caramel comes to a deep amber color but I found that by the time mine got to that point it already tasted a little bitter and I still needed to cook it longer to add the butter and the cream. I should have added the butter and cream when the caramel reached a warm amber color. I found the caramel tasted like those Werther’s candies at that stage. My other suggestion for making this is to not add the peanuts to the caramel but rather spread the caramel and then sprinkle the peanuts on top before pouring the ganache. It makes it very easy to spread instead of getting the spatula hung up on clumps of peanuts. The next time I make this I’d use semi-sweet instead of bittersweet chocolate, and add macadamia nuts instead of the peanuts.
