Fig And Goat's Cheese Tart With Honey And Walnuts | Tin and Thyme (2024)

This fig and goat’s cheese tart with walnuts is enhanced with thyme and honey. For even more pizazz, add a drizzle of homemade spiced chocolate balsamic vinegar. It makes for a great starter or light lunch when you don’t want to spend too much time on preparation. It looks impressive and tastes fantastic. Bake as one large tart or cut the pastry into squares or rectangles for individual tarts.

Savoury Chocolate Recipes

When I first started this blog, I envisioned creating a number of savoury recipes using chocolate. But somehow my sweet tooth got the better of me and not many savoury chocolate dishes have in fact appeared. So when I made contact with a certain talented and loquacious goat called Ethel (how many goats do you know on Twitter?), I bucked my ideas up.

Ethel kindly invited me to join in the #CapricornChallenge and I was delighted. The idea was to come up with an exciting recipe or three using Capricorn Cheese. There is no rule to say that the results have to be savoury, but I wanted to expand my culinary horizons.

Goats

Goats and I go back a long way. When I was a child I spent many a happy week on a remote Cornish smallholding where I went to bed by candlelight and drew water from the well. As well as feeding the steaming pot of mash from the range to the chickens and moving the sheep from field to field, I spent much of my time with the goats.

It was my duty to take Starlight and Moonlight out each day in order to keep the brambles at bay. I also had to collect branches from the hedgerows to feed them with. Sadly my attempts at milking were less than successful. But I did get to drink a lot of goat’s milk and try my first ever goat’s cheese.

I also learnt that the front end of a goat can be somewhat dangerous; on occasion Moonlight took exception to being moved around and would butt to get her point across.

Fig And Goat’s Cheese Tart With Walnuts, Thyme And Honey

I’m sure Ethel is much better behaved. She must be because ahamper filled with good things, including some of her own wonderful cheese, duly arrived from her home in Somerset.

Plenty of ideas immediately sprang to mind. Some friends were the unsuspecting guinea pigs for one of those ideas: honeyed fig and goat’s cheese tart with walnuts and thyme drizzled with spiced chocolate balsamic vinegar.

In fact I used the chocolate vinegar for one of the dishes in my epicsix course chocolate themed dinner.

Figs are in season and so delicious right now. The tart is a Mediterranean inspired creation which I first made as a starter, but it also works well as a light lunch. To give the starter its chocolate hit, I started by making some chocolate balsamic vinegar. Yes, you heard right; it needs to be tried to be believed.

Everyone who’s tried it is really impressed with this honeyed fig and goat’s cheese tart. The sweet sticky figs complement the salty creamy cheese and the crunch of walnuts add another dimension to the texture. And the flavour of thyme completes the Mediterranean feel nicely.

Turns out, however, that the crowning glory is the chocolate balsamic. It brings out the flavours of everything else as well as making its own distinct contribution. Who would have thought such an unusual condiment could be so good? It’s rich, fruity and chocolatey and the sour vinegar cuts through both the cheese and sweet figs beautifully.

Individual Fig And Goat’s Cheese Tarts: 2018 Update

I originally made this honeyed fig and goat’s cheese tart as individual tarts. They worked particularly well as the aforementioned dinner party starter. Because I used ready made puff pastry, they were incredibly quick and easy to make. But they looked and tasted rather classy too.

See Also

How To Make Vegan Hot Water Crust PastryEasy German Pear Cheesecake RecipeThe Best Pub Food RecipesHow to Make Posh Vegan Mushy Peas

I’ve subsequently updated the post to reflect the photos of the single large tart you can now see. In this format, it works brilliantly as a light lunch for four.

Other Puff Pastry Recipes You Might Like

• Chocolate mushroom vol-au-vents
• Galette des rois (vegan)
• Mushroom tart
• Puff pizza pies
• Roasted beetroot galette

Keep in Touch

Thanks for visiting Tin and Thyme. If you make this honey, fig & goat’s cheese tarts or the chocolate balsamic vinegar, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below or via social media. Have you any top tips? Do share photos on social media too and use the hashtag#tinandthyme, so I can spot them.

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If you’d like more tasty tart recipes, follow the link and you’ll find I have quite a lot of them. All delicious, of course.

Choclette x

Fig And Goat’s Cheese Tart. PIN IT.

Linkies

• Thyme was an important constituent of this fig and goat’s cheese tart, so I’m including it in Herbs on Saturday. Karen of Lavender and Lovage runs this lovely fragrant challenge. As I don’t use herbs in my chocolate creations very often, I don’t get the chance to enter very often either.
• Although I’ve already entered this month’s One Ingredientwith my figgy flapjacks, I used dried figs. However they are nothing like fresh figs, so I am entering this one too. Laura of How to Cook Good Food and Working London Mummy alternate hosting this monthly challenge.
• Figs are in full season right now, so I am also entering my Mediterranean inspired tart into Simple & in Season, hosted this month by Katie Bryson of Feeding Boys and a Firefighter.