Low calorie chocolate tart

I have been calorie counting lately and I regularly search the BBC Good Food website for low calorie meals and it is usually great. As everyone counts calories differently and uses different brands of ingredients I then put the list into the myfitnesspal.com recipe tool and check before making whatever it is.

Being a sweet tooth I searched for low calorie puddings on the site and it came up with this chocolate tart. Awesome I thought! A whole decent sized chocolate tart full of chocolatey goodness with only 184 calories per portion.

So I popped the ingredients list into the recipe tool and it was coming out with something a lot higher. It was more like 250 calories a portion even when I split it into eight rather than four portions. I know that doesn't seem like a big difference but when you're on 1200 (net of exercise) calories a day believe me it makes all the difference.  I was quite disappointed. I have no idea how they came up with that calorie count unless the portions are a quarter of one of the four tarts. I had already drooled over this recipe and became obsessed with making it closer to the calorie count I was originally expecting. I couldn't mess with the main chocolatey ingredients of course but I thought I'd play with the pastry. Using eight sheets of filo pastry instead of the shortcrust I managed to get it down to 190 calories for a portion 1/8th of a whole big tart. That was more acceptable so on Tuesday evening, having returned home briefly I set about putting the filo pastry in layers in a tin and gathering all the ingredients for the middle. I knew I was going to be called out again but did not anticipate it being for quite so long. I returned home just after 10pm to find that Mr VST had made the filling and finished it off. A piece of chocolate tart was music to my weary soul when I returned home.

It is good and chocolatey, as you would expect when it has two bars of dark chocolate in it! You don't really need eight sheets of filo pastry and in fact you could probably make it without the pastry at all and it would make lovely chocolatey brownie-type things.

It's amazing how resourceful you become when you are calorie counting. I enjoy succeeding in the challenge of eating like a (vegetarian) king on such a low calorie budget. Maybe I'm just sad but it is rewarding to see the scales tipping back towards their pre-Christmas marker.

Chocolate Filo Tart - maybe a bit OTT with the filo?!