Last night at church we had an event to celebrate the Young Women who have graduated from high school and are getting ready for college and the next phase in their lives.  I was on treat duty so I found this recipe on a website called http://www.spoonforkbacon.com and decided to give it a try.  It was pretty easy but I took a few shortcuts to make it even easier.  Everyone really seemed to like them and since there were hardly any leftover, I’m calling it a success!  Congratulations Brianne, Niki, Chantal and Sidney!  Our neighborhood won’t be the same without you!

almond nut butter crust:

1 cup flour

1/2 cup ground almonds

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 stick unsalted butter (8 tablespoons), cut into cubes

1 egg yolk

1 1/2 tablespoons ice water

filling:

1 1/2 cups Nutella

1 tablespoon sea salt, divided

whipped cream:

1 cup heavy cream

3 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla

1  Preheat oven to 375.

2  Place flour, almonds and salt into food processor and pulse together.  (I put whole almonds in first and ground them up then added the flour and salt and pulsed them all together.)

3  Add butter and pulse until mixture has a fine, mealy texture.

4  Add egg yolk and water and pulse until well combined and a dough forms.

5  Remove dough from food processor and lightly knead.

6  Divide and press dough into twelve 3″ tart pans.  (I sprayed the tart pans with Pam first.  My little tart pans were various sizes so I got about 22 tarts from this recipe.)

7  Chill the tart shells in the freezer for 30 minutes.

8  Fill each shell with pie weights (didn’t have any pie weights so used dried lima beans, worked great!) and place onto a baking sheet.

9  Bake for 15 minutes then lower the oven temperature to 350, remove the pie weights and continue to bake for another 10 – 12 minutes or until shells are light brown.

10  Allow to cool completely before removing baked crusts from the tart pans.  Fill each crust with Nutella and top with a sprinkle of sea salt (totally forgot the sea salt because I was in a hurry!).

11  For the whipped cream, place the ingredients for the whipped cream into a mixing bowl and beat together with a hand mixer.  Beat mixture until stiff peaks form.  (Or you can just use Cool Whip like I did!)

12  Scoop the mixture into a piping bag and pipe over each tart.  (Courtney suggested that I add a slice of strawberry so I did that to about half the tarts.)

I needed to make more tarts but was running out of time so for the second batch, I used a pouch of Betty Crocker sugar cookie mix for the shells (just follow the instructions on the package to prepare the dough) and they came out great too.  You don’t need to put the beans in the cookie tart shells but as soon as they come out of the oven, you need to press the middles down with a tart shaper or the back of a spoon so that you have an indentation for filling in each shell.  Here’s a picture of the tarts with cookie shells: