This past week, my workplace had their annual bakeoff and I decided to submit something. I wanted to make a passionfruit tart but after realizing how expensive passionfruit was, I switched gears and made something else. Using a combination of the recipes from Claire Saffitz and Stella Parks, I’ve made a s’mores tart and meringue cookies.

Recipes used:

• Tart Crust: Claire Saffitz’s pâte sucrée recipe from Dessert Person
• Chocolate Pudding/Marshmellow Meringue: Stella Parks’ recipe from Bravetart but it can also be found here

S’mores Tart (it’s long)

Going into this, I felt pretty good. I’ve made each of the three components (tart, chocolate filling, and meringue) before but all in three separate dishes (fruit tarts, chocolate pie, lemon meringue pie). I thought this would be a walk in the park.

And it sort of was..straightforward, with interesting results.

The first part was making the pâte sucrée tart dough. I made quick work with the dough with a food processor and popped it in the fridge to chill overnight. The next day, I shaped it into the tart pan, froze it, and baked it. It was a bit finicky this time around, maybe because I was working with a 9-inch tart pan. I’ve historically made this crust before with 4-inch tart pans without much issue but for whatever reason, it is harder to remove the tarts from a 9-inch pan.

I actually ended up overbaking the crust a little bit after the dough was spread thin in some parts on the base, leading to some uneven spots where there were clearly more spots of dough on the bottom and even some cracks. Luckily, spotting it with some dough scraps worked but I could tell that the crust was fragile, which made me a bit nervous. In hindsight, when I was forming the crust onto the pan, I should’ve just pressed the side dough pieces, then the bottom dough pieces, and then pressed and sealed them both together at the same time with a metal measuring cup. Maybe that would’ve helped me spread my dough more evenly.

I also noticed that the baked crust seemed to have molded together with the removeable tart pan bottom, making it near impossible to remove without breaking off the bottom. With the bottom already pretty thin and fragile, I was not confident enough to remove the bottom metal piece and accepted that this was going to be part of the final dessert.

So, I moved onto the chocolate filling. I didn’t encounter any issues, making this, as I’ve made this before with the chocolate pie back in march. Though, it definitely tasted a little less rich, which I suspected was due to using 2% milk over whole milk.

Which left the Swiss meringue topping. I’m very happy to say that something that was often very finicky for me, I did not run into any issues making it this time. From past experience, I made sure that the temperature (175F) of the meringue was stable by actually taking it off the stove and sticking in the thermometer then, rather than over the stove, where the temperature was much more volatile. This topping was able to whip up to the correct stable consistency with stiff peaks without much issue.

When it came to topping the cake with the meringue, the meringue sort of slid around on the pudding where I noticed I was mixing chocolate streaks into the white meringue as I tried to spread it across the pie. In hindsight, it might have been better to try piping the meringue onto the pie, rather than spreading it but alas, there I was. After grabbing a turntable and periodically wiping my offset spatula as I spread the meringue around, I eventually covered most of the pie with the meringue, making some swoops with a fork for points.

I was a bit weary of placing something that I usually took for a no-bake experience (chocolate pudding) into the oven but for the sake of toasting the meringue, I put the entire pie in there for ~20 minutes at 350F until the top was hardened. I noticed that the pudding that wasn’t covered by the meringue ended up melting a bit, probably a sign of why it was important to covered the entirety of the pie with the meringue to shield the chocolate pudding.

I was supposed to leave the pie to cool down for an hour at RT but because I was already on a time crunch, I waited 15 minutes before placing it in the fridge to cool for the next 4 hours. Again, another thing in hindsight that I wished that I’ve done was let it sit for a little longer at RT to allow the steam to escape because over the course of the next few hours in the fridge, the meringue was no longer crunchy and ended up softening to a tacky texture. The pudding also ended up softening the crust in some spots, alerting me that the crust probably had a crack somewhere that the filling got into. The tart was wetter than I expected. This filling worked much better with the pie crust.

It was still edible but not ideal. But with the time crunch, I just rolled with it and took it with me to work.

Meringue Cookies

I had some leftover meringue and didn’t know what to do with it so I pulled out a piping bag with a star tip and got to work, making roughly ~60 cookies.

So much meringue.

The recipe that I used (also from Stella Parks) called for me to bake the cookies for 2hr at 200F. The temperature ended up being a bit finicky for me since the oven that I was working with, couldn’t handle with the low baking temperature super well. Setting the oven T to 200F actually set the oven T closer to 175F, while setting the oven T to 225F set the oven T closer to 250F. In the midst of tinkering with the oven temperature, these cookies took closer to 2.5hr to fully bake. I waited until the meringue cookies were baked enough where I could slide a spatula and pop them off the parchment paper easily. These cookies were light, crunchy, and not too sweet. In a “why not?” moment, I decided to take these cookies with me to work too to be a second entry to entire into the contest.

Overall

So, the s’mores tart ended up taking second place by both the judging panel and by popular vote. I wasn’t too surprised. The first place winner made these really good strawberry lime petit-fours. They both looked and tasted good; I knew immediately that I wasn’t winning against her dish. I really want to do something with those flavors–lime and strawberry taste really good together.

I think my tart was decent but definitely not my best work. I liked the individual components of the tart but there is definitely some finetuning that needs to be done to make the final product come more cohesively together.

I’m glad that people had some enjoyment out of it. One particular comment that I liked that someone made about it was: “It looks like it has a good shelf life.”

I’ve never received a comment like that before. My coworker assured me it was a compliment.

Surprisingly, the popular vote nominated my meringue cookies as third place so I ended up taking two places on the bake off podium. Weird of how something that I made on a whim did that well.

Bonus: Chocolate and Vanilla Cupcakes

For a student’s birthday, I also made the cupcake version of the one bowl devil’s chocolate cake with chocolate ganache frosting that I’ve made before and some white mountain vanilla cupcakes with frosted buttercream. Nothing too new while making this. I discovered how cloyingly sweet vanilla buttercream was (butter and powdered sugar). I personally did not like the buttercream but it seemed to be a hit with the students. I guess they can afford to metabolize something like in their diets.

I also learned how to pipe roses! You start from the center of the cupcake, then pipe off-center and in a spiral, tilting the cupcake as you go.

Again, my personal favorite was the chocolate cupcakes with milk chocolate frosting.