16th Recipe: Going Bananas

Hope everyone had a nice Easter ! I had a great deal of issues with this recipe. Here’s the picture so you know what we’re talking about….

First off–I love the chocolate curls—hate the whole banana stuck in the tart. That’s got to go. There’s a chocolate crust filled with a pastry cream that has “curried bananas flambé” folded into it, topped off with a crème chiboust. That’s right, my first chiboust. It’s like a meringue with a gelatinized cream folded into it for richness. I was concerned; I found my first real mistake in the book. For the chiboust, she has you make the pastry cream; cool it to 104 degrees, and then fold it into a French meringue. A French meringue need to be baked since it is uncooked. It takes 140 degrees to cook an egg white to be safely eaten. So I looked up other chiboust recipes, and sure enough….they all call for mixing the pastry crème with an ITALIAN meringue, not a French; since an Italian is cooked. So I made the Italian meringue to be safe. The chiboust turned out fine. The whole thing-not so much. My husband liked it. My mother also. I personally was not a big fan of the curried banana filling, and I went LIGHT on the curry powder. Here’s mine….

I just used chocolate leaves instead of the bananas. And my chocolate curls could have used a little more curl, but all-in-all, a success.