Kirsten Tibballs shares the recipe for Midnight, a headturning dessert where chocolate, raspberry and coconut play together. Tibballs demonstrated this dish at Masterclass supported by Sanpellegrino during the 2019 Melbourne Food & Wine Festival.

Makes 3 tarts

Ingredients

Coconut pastry
195g unsalted butter
130g pure icing sugar
50g desiccated coconut
65g egg
340g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
3g baking powder
3g salt
Callebaut Mycryo Cocoa Butter, for dusting

Raspberry jelly
6 gelatine sheets
460g seedless raspberry purée, defrosted
70g caster sugar

Dark chocolate mousse
1 gelatine sheet
600ml cream 35% fat
300g Callebaut Madagascar dark couverture 67%
130ml sugar syrup (see note)
75g egg yolks

Vanilla marshmallow
10 gelatine sheets
600g caster sugar, plus extra to fill a jug
100g dextrose
Seeds scraped from 4 vanilla beans (Kirsten Tibballs uses Heilala)
100ml liquid glucose
300g cornflour

To finish
300g Callebaut Sao Thomé Origin dark couverture 70%
120 fresh raspberries (around 40 per tart)
Gold leaf, to garnish (optional

Method

For the coconut pastry, beat the butter in an electric mixer until smooth. Add the icing sugar, coconut and egg and mix until smooth. Add the flour, baking powder and salt and mix until it just comes together. Remove the dough and press into a flat square. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 160°C. Roll out the chilled pastry to a thickness of 3mm. Cut out three 25cm x 10cm rectangles and place on a Demarle Silpain mat on a perforated tray. Bake until golden-brown (15 minutes). Dust with the cocoa butter when it comes out of the oven and allow to cool.

For the raspberry jelly, soak the gelatine sheets in a bowl of cold water until softened. Squeeze the excess water from the gelatine sheets and mix with a third of the purée and the sugar in a saucepan. Heat the mixture to 60°C, then mix in the remaining purée. Pour the mixture into a 24cm x 35cm half-size Demarle Flexipat or a lined tray of similar size and freeze. Once frozen, cut into three 24cm x 9cm rectangles and return to the freezer until required.

For the chocolate mousse, soak the gelatine sheet in a bowl of cold water. Semi-whip the cream and refrigerate. Melt the couverture in the microwave to 60°C. Combine the sugar syrup and egg yolks in a double-boiler and whisk until the mixture reaches 80°C to form a pâte à bombe.

Fold a small amount of the whipped cream into the couverture until it reaches a consistency similar to the pâte à bombe, then fold the couverture mixture into the pâte à bombe.

Squeeze the excess water from the gelatine, place in a bowl and melt in the microwave, ensuring it doesn’t boil. Add some of the chocolate mixture into the gelatine, mix thoroughly, then fold it all into the remaining chocolate mixture. Fold in the remaining whipped cream.

Pour the mixture into a half-size Demarle Flexipat and freeze. Once frozen, cut into three 24cm x 9cm rectangles and return to the freezer until required.

For the marshmallow, roll sheets of baking baker into tubes of 2cm diameter and secure them with sticky tape. Fill a jug to halfway with sugar to hold the marshmallow sticks upright.

Soak the gelatine sheets in a bowl of cold water to soften. Combine 300g caster sugar, the dextrose, vanilla seeds and 130ml water in a saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Remove from the heat. Squeeze the excess water from the gelatine and mix into the sugar mixture.

Warm the liquid glucose in a microwave, then transfer to a stand mixer. Whisking on high speed, slowly pour in the sugar mixture, ensuring you don’t hit the whisk. Continue whisking on high speed until the mixture reaches ribbon consistency. Transfer the mixture to a piping bag and pipe into the prepared tubes. Stand the tubes in the jug of sugar and leave for at least 1 hour at room temperature to set.

Line a baking tray with baking paper and sift the cornflour and remaining icing sugar on top. To remove the marshmallow from the tubes, cut the sticky tape and unroll the baking paper until the marshmallow is exposed. Heat the opposite side of the paper with a heat gun and gently shake until the marshmallow falls out. Coat the marshmallow tubes in the icing sugar mixture to prevent them sticking.

To finish, melt the chocolate or temper it if it contains cocoa butter. To temper the chocolate, heat in a plastic bowl in the microwave for 30 seconds at a time until you have 50 per cent liquid and 50 per cent pieces of chocolate. Stir it vigorously without additional heat until all the chocolate has melted. If you have some resistant pieces of chocolate, gently heat the chocolate with a hair dryer while stirring.

Spread a thin layer of chocolate onto a flexible plastic sheet with a PVC pipe. As soon as it sets, cut three 24cm x 9cm rectangles, place a flat tray on top and place in the fridge for 10 minutes or leave at room temperature for an hour.

Remove the chocolate rectangles from the plastic and, using metal cutters or round piping tubes of various sizes warmed slightly with a hair dryer or a paint-stripper gun, cut holes out of the chocolate rectangles.

To assemble, place a chocolate mousse rectangle on top of each coconut base followed by the raspberry layer, lining up evenly. Brush excess cornflour and icing sugar from the marshmallow tubes. Place alternate rows of marshmallow tubes and fresh raspberries on top diagonally, trimming the marshmallow tubes to fit. Place a couverture rectangle on top of each and garnish with gold leaf.

NOTE

To make sugar syrup, mix equal parts caster sugar and water, and bring the mixture to the boil to dissolve the sugar. Remove it from the heat and cool it before use.