How not to bake a Chocolate Pear Tart

Baking is not one of my strongest points. Funnily enough, some of the things I bake look really pretty, but they usually taste pretty ugly.

Take this pear tart for example. Looks lovely. Doesn't taste so lovely.

And that's certainly not the fault of the recipe. In fact, I based it on a recipe from Kitchen Stories which features many gorgeous Greek recipes, all of which I am sure are well proven. "Based" being the key word here. If I had have followed the recipe to the letter I'm sure this tart would have tasted amazing, even with my bad baking skills.

Unfortunately, my creativity got the better of me and my decision to use olive oil in the shortcrust instead of butter made this tart very challenging indeed! Not to mention, strangely tasting. Oh I know, don't yell at me...

On the other hand, using yoghurt in the filling instead of sour cream as was called for in the original recipe wasn't such a bad idea. I quite like the extra tartness that yoghurt imparts with sweet chocolaty things. But then again, I'm sure sour cream would have given this tart a much more appropriate custardesque filling.

But hey. I'd just bought a massive bag load of pears and really wanted to make something Greek with them. Why I didn't do something classic like honeyed pears or Apithea (stewed pears) escapes me, but lessons are learned this way, and I know I won't be using oil as a substitute for butter in shortcrust again!

For obvious reasons, I am not going to outline my version of the recipe here. I'm sure you'll have much greater success baking this tart if you follow this recipe :)