This Gingerbread tart has 2 essentials for a great Christmas dessert!

This year’s Gingerbread tart has the 2 essential items you could want in a Christmas dessert; gingerbread and chocolate!

Here is a chocolate Gingerbread tart recipe for all of you who want something a little different this Christmas. This Gingerbread tart has a base of Gingerbread biscuit and a delicious dark chocolate filling. For a rich and delicious dough we used Stork butter, whilst for the smooth chocolate filling we used NOVI dark chocolate. Both items are available from Whatsinstore. 

This Gingerbread tart is a stunner at Christmas gatherings and was definitely our favourite Christmas dessert so far. A great addition to our christmas tart recipes collection.  You can decorate the top with any shapes from the remaining biscuit dough according to taste, however, the recommended shapes are stars or gingerbread men. We chose stars and decorated them with icing sugar gel.

This Gingerbread tart looks a lot more complicated than it actually is. At the end of the day this is siimply a chocolate tart with ginger biscuit base. This whole Christmas tart took me a little over 1 hour to prepare and cook. However, keep in mind that you need to rest the gingerbread dough for at least one hour before shaping and cooling, and chill the tart (with chocolate filling) overnight to get the firm setting required. 

We already had a lot of the necessary ingredients at hand. Stork pastry butter is always available in our fridge, whilst the Novi Dark Chocolate from Whatsinstore is great for cooking, but also when you feel like indulging yourself in some chunky dark chocolate (Jonathan loves it with a glass of wine). 

Spices are always handy in our kitchen of course! We added cranberries and rosemary leaves for decoration but this is purely up to you how you decorate this tart. Just keep in mind that it is best to ensure that the chocolate ganache filling has set before decorating.

We added Amaretto di Saronno to this recipe because we felt that the amaretto complements the flavours and spices well. The alcohol also gives an extra kick to what is a very indulgent Gingerbread tart recipe. If you are only going to use amaretto for this recipe, you can opt for smaller bottles (usually around 5cl or 50ml so you’d likely need two). You can decide to use less or more as you deem best, even opting to omit it completely should you wish. We would recommend keeping it in the recipe because it was quite a good addition overall. 

Ingredients:

Gingerbread biscuit:

230g plain flour

100g Stork butter

100g brown sugar

3 tbsp golden syrup

1 tbsp ground ginger

1 tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

Chocolate Ganache:

300g dark NOVI chocolate

180ml milk

120ml coconut cream

80ml amaretto

80ml golden syrup

Method:

Gingerbread biscuit:

1. Sift the flour in a large bowl.
2. Mix in ginger, cinnamon and bicarbonate of soda
3. In a small bowl, melt the butter in a microwave for 40 seconds 
4. Add in the golden syrup and sugar. 
5. Combine both mixtures (dry ingredients and wet ingredients) 
6. Form a soft dough from the mixture.
7. Roll out the dough flat (50mm height) on baking paper and chill in the fridge for at least 1 hour.
8. Preheat the oven at 200oC
9. Line a tart tray with the gingerbread dough. Keep the remaining dough to cut out shapes (we chose stars in three different sizes) for the top. Place gingerbread shapes on baking paper and place both the tart tray and the gingerbread shapes in the oven.
10. Cook for 10-15 minutes and allow to cool
11. Decorate the stars with icing sugar gel

Chocolate Ganache:

1. Break the Novi chocolate bar into blocks and melt in a glass bowl over a bain marie. 
2. Add the coconut cream and make sure the chocolate blocks and coconut cream are thoroughly melted and combined.
3. Remove from heat and add the milk, amaretto and golden syrup.
4. When cool, fill the tart base with the chocolate ganache filling. 
5. Store in the fridge overnight so that it sets firmly 
6. Decorate with the stars, cranberries, rosemary leaves and ginger powder

If you’re planning on preparing this Gingerbread tart for Christmas, but still want to prepare some gingerbread men, double the gingerbread biscuit ingredients. You can decorate with some of the melted dark chocolate or even get creative and make use of the Novi CremaNovi. Gingerbread biscuit is great because the dough cannot be overworked, making it easy to work with to achieve a lovely gingerbread tart crust. The decoration part is of course a great activity for kids and adults alike!

You can also use that extra gingerbread pastry for other types of tarts perhaps. What about a pumpkin tart with gingersnap crust?

What did you think of this Gingerbread tart recipe? How would you decorate yours? If you’re looking at more Christmas dessert recipes, take a look at our Maltese chocolate log recipe coming out this week.