Walnut Ganache Tartlets

No finished kitchen pics yet, mostly because it's been grey and dreary for days, but also because I've been busy, busy, busy making messes in my kitchen.  I made Walnut Ganache Tartlets to bring into school for our Staff Appreciation Luncheon today.

And last week I made approximately a gazillion White Chocolate Lemon Meringue Tartlets and Fresh Berry Mini-Pavlovas for a fundraiser Saturday evening.

Here's how I made the Walnut Ganache Tartlets for today.  I started by placing a generous cup of walnuts on a baking sheet and popping them into a 350 oven.  After about 10 minutes they are perfectly toasted and fragrant.  It's important to keep an eye on toasting nuts, because they go quickly from perfectly toasted to burnt.

I pulsed the nuts in my mini chopper, reserved 1/4 cup of nuts for decoration, and gave the nuts another couple of pulses for a fine chop.

I mixed in 2/3 cup brown rice flour, 1/3 cup white rice flour, 1/3 cup amaranth flour, 1/3 cup potato starch, 1/3 cup arrowroot starch, 1/2 cup sugar, and 2 tbsps of lemon zest.

I cut in 12 tbsps of butter with a pastry blender,

and mixed in 2 slightly beaten eggs.  The mixture will look crumbly, but hold together if you ball it up.

I loosely fill an ungreased mini-muffin pan, and press the crumbs into the sides and bottom of each cup.

Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.

Let cool for 5 minutes before removing from the pan.  You should be able to spin them out of the pan.  I've shared several recipes that use ganache before.  These tartlets only need about 1/2 of my linked ganache recipe, but I like to make a full batch each time and keep some in the frig.  It often inspires off the cuff recipes like my Creamcheese Cookies w/ Ganache filling.  While the tartlets are cooling I made a batch of ganache.

Spoon some ganache into each tartlet cup,

and sprinkle on the reserved toasted walnuts.

While the tartlets were baking, I had piped out several masquerade masks, because the theme of today's Staff Appreciation Luncheon is Masquerade.  A trick I use to keep multiple piped items the same size is to sketch it out on paper and slide the waxed paper over my drawing.  Each mask(or butterfly, or whatever,) will still look individual, but the last one won't be twice the size of the first one.  

Always pipe more decorations than you actually need, because after they're chill in the freezer, some might break as you peel them off the waxed paper.

After the ganache cooled and set up, I placed a mask in each tart.

Thanks for popping in and baking with me.