Tuesdays with Dorie: Chocolate Pudding Ice Cream Tart Sandwiches

This week's assignment for Tuesdays with Dorie was a Chocolate Cream Tart in a chocolate tart shell. Sounded very good, and in fact a version of this once caused Mandy Patinkin to possibly break Pesach, but it was getting warm, pie is hard to keep in the refrigerator, and I wanted something a little different. So I kept the components and did a little inversion. I made the custard, a fairly standard chocolate pastry cream/pudding, with cornstarch, and chilled it. Then I made the tart dough but instead of filling a tart shell with it, I cut it into little cookies. It was very easy to work with.The 'cookies' were good, slightly more crumbly than your average (unsurprising, in that they were really a tart crust). I then froze the chocolate pudding in the ice cream maker.
The result was impressive, rich and perfect textured--the cornstarch in the pudding, which is also a component in classic gelato, helped it keep a smooth texture in the freezer, unlike a lot of my other ice cream, which freezes pretty hard. (A side note: I no longer use corn starch, I tend to use tapioca starch. Probably just as processed, but at least a variety in the crop). I scooped the pudding ice cream into a tray, and when it had hardened up a bit, cut out little circles of it with my biscuit cutter, and made sandwiches.
And people have been begging for them ever since. I did leave out the whipped cream, but I wouldn't doubt that these would be, well, enhanced, by a bit. If I'd been really clever, I would have slipped some in just before I stopped churning and gotten a swirl. But the texture was so good, I don't know that I would have liked to risk it.