Chocolate for your wardrobe

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Hota Restaurant's chef/co-owner Erin Silva Winston makes Dulce Du Leche and Chocolate Mousse Tarts for a Valentines day special. | Tamara Bell~Sun Times Media

Dulce de Leche and Chocolate Mousse Tarts

(Adapted from Hota)

Chocolate crust

1 stick butter

2/3 cup powdered sugar

1/8 cup almond flour (can substitute with blanched almonds ground to cornmeal consistency in a coffee grinder)

1 small egg

1 ¼ cups flour

1 tablespoon cocoa powder

Cream butter and salt. Add sugar and almond flour. Add eggs and half of the flour. Once combined, add second half of flour and cocoa powder.

Roll dough to about ¼-inch thickness, and bake in individual tart pans at 175 degrees for 7-10 minutes.

Caramel, salted with pecans

1 cup sugar

2 ¼ tablespoons glucose (can substitute corn syrup)

1 ½ sticks (

3/4 cup) butter, melted

1 cup heavy cream

Scrapings from the inside of three vanilla bean pods

Pinch of salt

2 cups toasted pecans

Sea salt, as desired, added to taste

Caramelize sugar and glucose in small kettle on stovetop until mixture becomes golden brown. Do not stir much while melting, or sugar will crystallize.

Once desired color is reached, add butter. Warm cream in microwave for a few seconds. Add cream, vanilla and salt to caramel mixture. Put back on stove until mixture reaches 150 degrees on a candy thermometer. Mix in pecans. Spoon mixture into tarts, topping with a pinch of sea salt. Cool in refrigerator.

Mousse

1/3 cup egg yolks

¼ cup simple syrup (Make syrup by dissolving two parts sugar into one part water.)

3

1/2 ounces bittersweet chocolate1 cup heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks

Whisk eggs and simple syrup in mixer. Place mixture over double boiler and whisk until thick. Place mixture back into mixer and whip until cool.

Melt chocolate in microwave and add to egg mixture. Combine chocolate and eggs with whisk. Fold in whipped cream. Once caramel has cooled on tarts, pipe mousse on top.

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Updated: February 22, 2012 12:13PM

Chocolate has powers. It’s been a magical food flavor for millennia. It’s been a holy substance for religious rites, as well as payment for taxes and goods. In modern times, the sweet delight most often serves as an offering to attract the attention — or procure the forgiveness — of the object of one’s affections.

So it’s quite reasonable that several local chefs have combined their love of chocolate and their passion for helping others pursue culinary career ambitions in a tasty project to promote a worthy cause.

Chocolate event

Because sugar is the livelihood of most of these creative cooks, they’ll volunteer that expertise — some even crafting exotic, cocoa-laden Venetian carnival costumes — to benefit the seventh annual For the Love of Chocolate, a French Pastry School scholarship fundraiser set for Feb. 25 in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart.

Recently, Erin Silva Winston and husband Jonadab Silva opened Hota, a fine dining establishment, in Evanston. The two chefs met a few years ago, when the restaurant was Jacky’s on Prairie.

“Some of our first dates were here,” Jonadab recalled, motioning toward the cozy bar in the front of what is now Hota. The dynamic team moved to a new condo and welcomed their first child 18 months ago. Erin graduated in December from the French Pastry School’s L’Art de la Patisserie program. But busy schedules aren’t stopping them from donating their time and muscle for the event.

The couple will make mango-crab ceviche on a beet salad.

Chocolate couture

Erin will also make a chocolate dress for the Venetian carnival-themed fashion show. She’ll make the bodice of the dress from cocoa beans, decorate it with sugar flowers, and accent the entire outfit with gum paste orchids. “To tie in the Mexican theme of our restaurant,” she said.

She will also make Dulce de Leche and Chocolate Mousse Tarts to sample. The dessert, which features a very fashionable salted caramel, will star on Hota’s menu for Valentine’s Day. Erin mixes pecans into melted salted caramel and scoops the mixture into cake-like chocolate shells. Each tart gets topped with a piping of chocolate mousse.

This will be the second year French Pastry School graduate Josh Baudin, co-owner of Sweet Whimsy in Long Grove, will participate; it is the first year Baudin will design for the fashion show.

“We’re going for kind of a woodland fanciful theme,” he revealed. His male model will wear a man’s skirt made of chocoa, a dark chocolate used often for such purposes. “I wouldn’t eat it,” Baudin advised. He’ll use the chocoa to design a skirt to look like big chunks of tree bark. A wooden staff will be decorated in chocolate, gum paste flowers and real flowers.

Going bananas

Baudin will also make Tropical Baby Banana Pops. “I love frozen bananas,” he said.

Bite-size banana pieces will be dipped in homemade guava jam and chocolate and topped off with a homemade mango chip. He will also make Serrano Balsamic Cake, soaking bite-size, cone-shaped pieces of butter cake in serrano pepper balsamic for one day and then coating the cakes in Valrhona dark chocolate.

Laura Parsons, a French Pastry School alum and pastry chef at Westmoreland Country Club in Wilmette, will make a peacock-inspired cocktail dress for the fashion show.

She’ll make the dress using plastic chocolate, a substance with a modeling clay consistency. She’ll use colored cocoa butter to achieve peacock colors — golds, purples, blues and greens. “I would prefer it if no one rubs up against the model, but I’m prepared for her to lose a few feathers,” Parsons said.