peppermint mocha tart

with an oreo cookie crust ok

HeY hi hello!!

Welcome back to bake chats!!

If ya follow me on Tik Tok then ya might know that I’ve been tinkering around with this tart. With that I want to take a second to chat recipe riffin’ and development yuh.

So, the recipes I share forever and always will be the things I want to eat, how I want to eat them. That’s kinda the point, especially if I’m gonna have to develop and test a recipe 3-12+ times to get it right AND make sure it works!!! Best believe I have to want to eat it to some degree.

But, to demystify the world of recipe development for ya, all recipes are derivative to some degree and are born from a precedent golden ratio or percentage. We’re actually just living in a forever loop of pre-existing recipes and we’re just putting our own food and cultural perspective on things. In this day and age I think it’s rare to see something truly new. The cremeux in this tart for example, it’s gonna look like a lot of cremeux recipes out there, I mean I opt for a little brown sugar and cocoa powder in the anglaise for flavor and extra richness. But, at it’s core it’s just like every other cremeux recipe out there. And it kinda has to be, for it to work and set in the way you’d expect it to work and set. Sure, I might add a little more chopped chocolate to anglaise for a thicker set, pushing the boundaries of the ratio until it breaks (that’s development btw), there will reach a point where there’s too much chocolate in relation to the custard, we’ve now hit the breaking point in the ratio.

When the holidays have gone and summer rolls around, maybe I’ll want a s’mores inspired tart. I’ll look back to this peppermint one and use the bones of it to create the next one- swap the oreo crust for a graham cracker one, same cremeux but hold the peppermint and instead of this lightly sweetened mascarpone whip, obviously go with the double torched swiss meringue on top. Having gone through the development of this tart will make every other iteration easier to bake through.

Ya know, if you watched the couple videos where I was still developing this recipe and you need need NEEDED it STAT. I told ya all the components, oreo crust, chocolate peppermint cremeux and either torched swiss or mascarpone whip. Recipes for each of those components already exist out there somewhere, you just gotta find ‘em put it all together. Because also, what if you waited around for me to post this recipe and it sucked? Food on the internet can look good, doesn’t mean it IS good. (Not the case here, I am 100% in the business of making good food ok). I am more so for taking your tried and true favorite recipes and using the internet for inspiration on how to tweak them for the flavors you want. If you already have a favorite chocolate cremeux recipe then use that and add a little pmint extract. I will say though, the beauty of having someone else develop a recipe for you, is that amounts are dialed in (hopefully… I mean the internet is rife with poorly tested recipes these days) and the amount of filling is proper to the pan and the crust, no guessing games on how much you need to make to fill a 9” tart pan.

I mean that’s exactly what I did when I first had the idea for this tart. I looked to the biscoff crust recipe from my passion fruit goat cheesecake recipe. Plucked the cremeux recipe from the yogurt mousse in my god tier chocolate cake recipe. And well the whip is just whip. But from there I swapped the biscoff crumbs for oreos. Instead of folding whipped cream into the anglaise to lighten it up the cremeux into a mousse, I left it pretty much as is, removing a little bit of chocolate for a silkier set and adding peppermint extract to taste before pouring that into the oreo cookie crust. I’m constantly calling back to old recipes for guidance, I put a real emphasis on developing strong base recipes so when I want something more specialized and specific and I have a jumping off point. Not everything is from scratch every single time.

From that first iteration, I note the things I like about the tart and what I think needs to change. I start dialing in things like the amount of crust in the pan, the amount of cocoa powder in the cremeux. Switching from torched swiss to whipped cream to finish. You also have to give yourself leeway for different outcomes from your original vision here. Every change I make to every version is d e v e l o p m e n t striving towards my ideal tart. Which I’ll now share with you xx ♡