Today, I made these little heart shape chocolate tartelettes with pistaccios.

I used heart shaped silicon moulds, but you can also use a lined muffin tin as an alternative, this will, of course, leave you with round mini-tartelettes instead of hearts, probably somewhat like my dark chocolate tartelette recipe with a white crust, which you find here. You can always use a storebought dough for these too, but the chocolate shells give the tartelettes an extra chocolaty kick – and a nice look too!

These chocolate shells take a bit of work and practice, but the filling is super easy – and even if the shells don’t come out perfectly, they will still taste delicious – so here we go:

Ingredients (12 tartelettes):

Shells:
150g flour
30g kakao unsweetened
50g icing sugar
120g butter (cold, in pieces)
1 medium sized egg
salt

Filling:
240ml cream (half&half or full)
200g dark chocolate, chopped into small pieces
60g butter (room temperature, in pieces)
pinch of salt

Topping:
Salted Pistacchios, roughly chopped

Preparation:

Shells:

For the dough, sieve in the flour, kakao and icing sugar. Add a pinch of salt. Add the pieces of butter and mix, until the texture looks something like oatmeal. Add the egg and mix for a while, until the mixture begins to stick together and form a ball. Knead the mixture shortly by hand and make a cylinder out of it. Cover it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for about an hour.
For your tarte shells, cut the cylinder into 12 slices and roll them out with a bit of flour, so the dough doesn’t still to your wrolling pin. The dough should be around 3-4mm thick. Place the rolled out dough into your moulds.
Refridgerate them for another half an hour.
Preheat your oven to 200° Celcius.
Cover the inside of the shells with foil and weigh it down with dried pulses for blind baking (I use dried chickpeas that I store separately in a jar in order to (re-)use whenever I need to blind bake something). Blind baking helps to keep the dough nice and flat.
Bake for about 10 minutes.
Remove the foil and bake 2-3 more minutes. Allow to cool before removing the shells from the moulds and filling the.

Filling:
Shortly bring the cream to the boil, remove it from the heat and add the chocolate.
Let it sit for ca. 2 minutes. Whisk until the chocolate and cream are combined, add  pieces of butter one by one and whisk until smooth. Season with just a pinch of salt.
Pour the cream into the tarte shells and let the tartelettes cool in the fridge for around 10 minutes. Decorate the tartelettes with your pistaccio pieces and put them back in the fridge for another 1-2 hours until they’re set – and enjoy!