LPK's Culinary Groove (Part 1)

Passion Fruit Truffle Tart: semisweet ganache and passion fruit caramel sauce nestled in a chocolate shortbread crust with cape gooseberry garnish. (description from LPK's Culinary Groove menu)

My first entry! I originally conceived of this blog as a mini-tour guide to the patisseries of Toronto, in the spirit of The Patisseries of Paris by Jamie Cahill. I have dialled down my ambitions and instead, have chosen to give my impressions of various pastries and hot chocolates available at Toronto shops. It also means that I can go back to the same place and try out new items!

I don't have any formal training in desserts or chocolate, but I continue to educate myself in cities all over the world at every possible opportunity.

LPK's Culinary Groove's Passion Fruit Truffle Tart looks well-put together and elegant with a touch of whimsy from the fresh flower. I aspire to look like this pastry when I go to work in the morning. I'm glad the cape gooseberry was replaced by the flower, although I remain in the dark regarding what a cape gooseberry looks like.

The crust is a very moist shortbread so it sticks together with a slightly nutty in flavor, very thick on the sides but thinner on the bottom. While I am not usually a crust person, the drawback to the thinner crust in this instance is that there was nothing to absorb the ganache and, especially, the jam-like passion fruit caramel sauce.

The passion fruit caramel sauce formed approximately 1/3 of the tart with the remainder topped off by the ganache. The sauce was not as pungent when the tart was still cold, but as it warmed up to room temperature, the caramel and the sweet elements in the passion fruit started to overwhelm the chocolate. There was an undertone of tartness to the sauce, which I enjoyed and I suspect would have been echoed in the missing gooseberry. My suggestion to improve this tart would have been to use a darker chocolate with some acidity to balance the sweetness of the sauce, which I found to be too cloying in the end.

I liked the texture of this tart. The flavours of the sauce were carried by the stickiness of the ganache so that they seemed to infuse the chocolate.