This dessert is a fun twist on a fruit tart, featuring a chocolate puffed rice crust and fresh fruit.
Crunchy and soft, tasty and light: sweets with puffed rice are easy and quick to make. Puffed rice, in fact, is an extremely versatile ingredient but it’s in snack and dessert recipes that its taste and texture is most successfully enhanced. Moreover, preparing desserts with puffed rice is very easy as the only cooking required is the one needed to melt a little chocolate!
Puffed rice and crisped rice (like Rice Krispies) are both made with rice, but each have distinctive tastes and textures. The making of crisped rice cereal involves sugar in the popping process. Puffed rice is made by dry roasting white or brown rice kernels alone, hence the difference.
This tart base is made with ‘puffed rice’ as it is great for the crunchy base of creamy desserts like cheese tarts.
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- 2 cups puffed rice or crisped rice
- 50 gm dark chocolate
- 400 gm ricotta cheese
- 5-6 Tbsp powdered sugar or to taste
- 1 vanilla bean
- 2 large fresh nectarines or peaches
- sweet red grapes, seedless OR red currants, strawberries or your choice
Ingredients
Base
Filling
Fruit
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- Finely chop dark chocolate with a knife & place it in a microwavable dish. Melt chocolate on high for a few seconds, then remove the dish & mix with a spoon. Place the chocolate back in the microwave & heat for a few seconds & mix again. Repeat this until the chocolate is completely melted.
- Heat the puffed rice in the microwave for 30 seconds to avoid thermal shock once the two ingredients are combined. Place the hot puffed rice in a large bowl with the melted chocolate & stir to mix them well.
- Transfer the mixture to a 14 x 4-inch rectangular tart pan with a removeable bottom. Distribute the mixture evenly in the pan, pressing it down to compact it as much as possible. Place in refrigerator for at least an hour to become firm.
- In a food processor, pulse ricotta to become more of a creamy texture, add powdered sugar. Cut the vanilla pod lengthwise & with a knife extract seeds to add to the cream to flavor it. Blend well. Fill puffed rice pastry shell with half of the ricotta cream & spread into a smooth layer. Place remaining cream in a pastry bag with a star tip nozzle.
- Wash nectarines/peaches & slice thinly keeping the peel. Wash & dry grapes. Slice each in half.
- Line sides & ends with sliced nectarines/peaches. Pipe a creative pattern of ricotta cream down the center of tart. Add a few clusters of halved grapes & some fresh mint leaves for decoration.
- The cold ricotta tart can be kept in the refrigerator for 2-3 days. Freezing is not recommended.