Schoggieili Tart
“Baking with toddlers is not the bonding moment I had hoped for,” my friend recently wrote to me.
Agreed.
Sometimes their deft little hands surprise you by removing all the seeds from a pumpkin, or managing to roll a bit of dough, but in my house it’s mostly just regulating the attempted ingestion of ingredients, mostly raw.
“You have to cook that first!” I yell as she tries to chomp potatoes or eat a teaspoon of flour.
Thinking I was clever, I let her bite into a raw onion, but she just grinned and continued eating it like an apple.
“Peel it at least!”
It was naïve to think I could put little hands to work unwrapping the chocolate eggs. But it was morning! And she’d just finished breakfast! She couldn’t possibly want chocolate.
I should have looked in the mirror.
Thankfully, I could give her another important task, bashing cookies with a rolling pin.
She excelled.
This is a pretty simple no-bake dessert—cookie crust plus ganache top—and you can use most kinds of chocolate, not just your leftover Easter Schoggi. However, the polka-dotted Migros Schoggieili (chocolate eggs) are beloved for a reason—they’re delicious. And they’re the perfect chocolate for this tart.
200 g cookies
50 g butter, melted
300 g chocolate, chopped
200 ml cream
pinch salt
Line the bottom of a 24 cm / 9 inch round tart pan with parchment paper.
Using your hands or a food processor, break the cookies into fine crumbs.
Add the melted butter and stir until it comes together. Press evenly into the bottom of the pan.
Now melt the chocolate:
Put a large pot of water on high heat and set a large bowl on top of it (stainless steel works best). Once the water is boiling, turn off the heat, then add the chocolate to the bowl on top. This should melt with the residual heat (be patient), but if it is taking too long, briefly turn the heat back on.
Once you have a smooth chocolate mixture, take the bowl off the pot, wiping the water from the bottom.
Fold in the cream—it will thicken up, but just keep stirring. Once it is all combined, pour over your biscuit base.
Cover with plastic wrap and chill for about three hours, or overnight.
If you don’t have speculaas on hand, many other cookies can serve as the base—graham crackers, petite-beurres, Bretzeli, etc.
More tricks for making cookie crumbs: put the cookies in a plastic bag and bash with a rolling pin, or put the cookies in a bowl and use a ladle to crush them finely.
