Blackberry Tart with Chocolate and Mascarpone

This blackberry tart has a rich, buttery, and chocolatey pastry at its base — but that’s not the best part. The filling is almost mousse-like, with a light and airy sweet mascarpone whisked with lusciously silky cream and blackberry jam. It’s a real eye-catching treat and tastes as good as it looks.

It’s officially blackberry season. Lining the country hedgerows are countless plump, sweet fruits hiding amongst dense thickets. Where I grew up in the U.K., blackberry picking is a cherished family tradition — after all, fresh, juicy fruits are too good to pass up on, especially when they’re free. While it’s common for people to cook blackberries into tart blackberry jam, I have an even more exciting treat for you today: a vibrant, decadent, luxurious, fruity, and creamy blackberry tart.

The subtly bitter notes ideally complement the milder, fruitier tones of the filling. And speaking of the filling, it’s glorious — you can eat two slices at a time! The blackberry tart is incredibly easy to make, yet breathtakingly beautiful and IDEAL for special occasions.

In fact, saying this blackberry tart is pretty somehow feels like an understatement. Oh my …

• To make this blackberry tart recipe gluten-free, replace the all-purpose flour with gluten-free flour and about 3/4 tsp xantham gum to stabilize. Alternatively, make a no-bake crust by mixing gluten-free chocolate cookies with butter and pressing the blend into the tart case, much like you would for cheesecake. 
• To make this blackberry tart vegan, you’ll have to make a lot of substitutions. Instead of using butter in the pastry, choose your favourite non-dairy alternative. For U.S.-based readers, I enjoy Miyoko’s European Cultured Butter alternative, whereas, in the U.K., Flora Salted Plant Butter is my go-to for pastry. Omit the egg entirely, but you may need to add more liquid to make up for the loss of moisture. Finally, for the filling, you’ll need to replace the cream with a vegan alternative — there are many choices — and replace mascarpone and cottage cheese with vegan yoghurt mixed with a touch of sugar and lemon juice. Because this mixture is likely thinner, I highly recommend using coconut milk to make thickened vegan whipped cream, adding agar agar as a stabilizer, or blending soaked cashews into the yoghurt. 

What Ingredients Are in this Blackberry Mousse Tart?

• Plain Flour (All-purpose flour) is the base of our pastry dough for the tart. 
• Dutch-processed cocoa powder provides a subtly bitter chocolate flavour for the tart pastry. 
• Salted butter adds rich butteriness to the pastry. I recommend using salted butter as it complements the chocolate so well. 
• Egg yolk is incredible for enriching our pastry with flavour and helps the texture, too.
• Blackberries are the primary flavour of our filling. I always use freshly picked blackberries, but store-bought or even frozen work just as well. Blackberries are sweet, with tart undernotes. 
• Granulated sugar helps to balance the natural tartness of the raspberries. 
• Mascarpone is a silky Italian set cream cheese with a naturally sweet flavour. 
• Cottage cheese adds tanginess and a hint of sourness to our tart. It pairs well with the blackberries. 
• Icing sugar sweetens the tart filling, which is otherwise full of many savoury ingredients. It’s just enough to be dessert-like without being overpowering. Icing sugar is also known as powdered sugar or confectioners sugar, and due to its lightness, it preserves the velvety consistency. 
• Madagascan vanilla extract delivers just a touch of floral notes.
• Double cream adds richness and thickens the filling when whipped.

What are Blackberries?

Blackberries are fruit from bramble shrubs — the same genus that produces raspberries, dewberries, and cloudberries. The bramble is known for its sharp thorns and grows across Europe, North America, and Mexico. In the U.K., many consider picking blackberries a popular pastime, while others regard the shrubs as a nuisance due to their dense thicket and painful thorns. The best months for picking blackberries depend on the location but generally fall between August, September, and early October.

Blackberries themselves are small fruits made from many small drupelets. In fact, although they’re called a berry, blackberries are fruits, not berries! Blackberries have an intensely sweet, juicy, and tart flavour that lends itself particularly well to syrups, jams, jellies, wines, and yes … blackberry tarts!

Variations on this Blackberry Tart

• No-bake. The filling for this tart is already a no-bake (although it does need to be set in the fridge), so the only thing to do is adapt the pastry. Instead of making a sweet shortcrust pastry, mix crushed chocolate cookies with salted butter — just as you would for cheesecake. You’ll need about 270g of cookies to 75g of salted butter.
• More set. The consistency of the filling in this tart is like a mousse — light, airy, silky, and delicious. If you prefer a more “set” and firm tart filling, you’ll need to add a stabilizer. Most recipes will use gelatin, but that’s not vegetarian, so we recommend agar agar. Agar agar is not a direct substitute for gelatin, so check the packet instructions for quantities. This size blackberry tart would generally use one packet — 7g — of gelatine for comparison. 
• Vegan. See the “Is This Recipe Vegan, Gluten-Free, Soy-Free, and Nut-Free?” section. 
• Mixed berries. Who says you have to use only blackberries? Nobody! You can mix blackberries with blueberries or raspberries. 
• Budget-friendly. Let’s face it — Unfortunately, mascarpone is not the most affordable of ingredients. You can substitute mascarpone for extra cottage cheese or switch them out for natural or Greek yoghurt. 

This Recipe Is …

Frequently Asked Questions about Blackberry Tart

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