Seventh Anniversary

As some of you may know, this weekend marked the seventh anniversary that John and I have been a couple.  We had a great time celebrating it, and as usual in our lives, food was the center of the celebration.  I made my very first vegetable tarte and it came out magnificently.

I altered (but only slightly) this recipe.  I halved it to make only one tarte, replaced the mushrooms with zucchini (just because I didn't have mushrooms, but did have zucchini) and omitted the cheese (for the usual reason).  I made the puff pastry from scratch from this recipe I have used before.  The only problem I had with the whole tarte was that the bottom crust was not as crisp as I would like.  I think I could fix this problem next time by lining the bottom of the pan with parchment paper and covering the top with foil to cook the tarte an extra ten minutes or so.  I sprinkled the bottom crust with semolina to absorb any extra liquid.  Can any of you think of a method to insure a crisp bottom crust?

I had some leftover puff pastry, so I decided to make a dessert with the leftovers.

Raspberry chocolate tarte

half a recipe of puff pastry
about a cup and a half frozen raspberries
a handful of chocolate chips
one egg yolk
a splash of water
granulated sugar

Roll out the puff pastry to a thin sheet.  Place it on a parchment lined cookie sheet.  Cut diagonal lines along the edges of the sheet like this:

(sorry about my crude diagram)  Arrange the raspberries and chocolate along the center of the pastry, leaving room at the ends.  Fold the first edges around, tearing off any extra pastry.  Fold over the flaps of pastry in a braiding motion until you get to the other end where you tuck and tear like you did the first end.  Your raw pastry should look like this:

Combine the egg yolk and water.  Whip it together and then brush generously on the surface of the pastry.  Sprinkle with sugar.  Refrigerate the whole thing.  If you will be waiting to bake it for more than an half hour, cover the pastry with plastic wrap.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Place the pastry in the oven and bake about 30 minutes, or until the pastry puffs and becomes golden brown.  The ends of my pastry were done before the middle so I covered them with foil and allowed the center to brown up.

I hope you treat someone special to this treat.  We found it delicious!