It's time to bake again! Yep, you guessed it, the first of the internet-wide baking extravaganzas of 2005: Sugar High Fridays are back! This time around, Viv of Seattle Bon Vivant is our gracious hostess-with-the-mostest, and her chosen ingredient is nuts. When Viv was trying to choose her theme or ingredient for her turn at hosting Sugar High Fridays she came up with a few different ideas, but when she emailed me one cool Tuesday evening with, and I quote:

NUTS! ;-)

I knew she had hit the nail on the head. What goes better with a sugar high than a rich tasting, crunchy nut?

Since then the idea of a nutty dessert has been in the back of my mind; what could I make that used nuts, not just as an addition, but more as the base and the "meat" of the dessert as well? Pouring over recipes kept leading me back to some sort of tart. I did consider simply re-making the nut tart I made last February from a Martha Stewart recipe, but I wanted something a little more complicated, and also something with chocolate in it. I considered just a version of the standard pecan pie with chocolate, but decided against it. I thought of Hello Dolly bars, which I did make a batch of for Christmas, but decided against them. There were Turtle Bars and Almond Biscotti or Pecan Sandies...nothing seemed right.

Back to the idea of a tart...I found a recipe from Bon Appétit magazine that was a pistachio tart made with a halvah crust...hmmm...that's an interesting idea. But I don't like halvah and besides, it's not made from nuts. What could I make a crust out of that is made from nuts? Marzipan! Yum. Okay. And pistachios are not my favourites, so why not use pecans instead? Yes. My creation, this pecan carmel chocolate tart is something very interesting. It's like a pecan pie that got all dressed up in her little black dress to go out on the town. A dressed up tart for Sugar High Fridays and Viv...what more could you want?

Well, considering I almost tossed it all at 8pm tonight and made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for SHF, The Nutty Edition, I guess I could want for some serious baking skills. It just seemed that at every turn during the making of this dessert I was in trouble. The marzipan crust ended up a bit too thin. The caramel filling was a bit too runny. The chocolate topping took two tries to make because, for some reason I can't melt chocolate like a normal human being. Of course, through it all I persevered, because I had promised Viv I would indeed participate in her hosting of SHF...and what would participation in something involving the Seattle Bon Vivant be without a little hectic business? She's always running in at midnight and whipping up gorgeous dishes...it's my turn.