Dalgona Coffee Tartlets

Dalgona coffee tartlets are four inch sweet crust tarts filled with a diplomat cream (pastry cream and whipped cream) spiked with Dalgona coffee cream. The filling is sweet, custardy, and full of deep coffee flavor and the tops are drizzled with dark chocolate. The crust is crumbly and slightly salty and is the perfect vessel for this complex dessert.

Recently my cousin made these awesome coffee drinks for us. I pretty much drink anything she makes since she used to work at Starbucks. (She’s quarantining with us now, so yes we have a barista in the house. 👍🏼 )

How to make Dalgona coffee cream:

To make Dalgona coffee cream, you add equal parts instant coffee, granulated sugar, and hot water. You can whip by hand (takes at least 5 minutes) or with a mixer (less than 1 minute). It whips up into this dreamy, meringue-like cream that can be added to hot or cold milk for a trendy coffee.

Normally I don’t like instant coffee because I’m faithful to my Counter Culture coffee, but this tasted really good! I suggest just trying this just to have the drink because it really is very simple and very tasty.

Dalgona coffee cream is incredibly versatile.

I started thinking about all the different ways this could be added to desserts. Because it is in cream form, you can add it to cake fillings, Swiss meringue buttercream, and sturdy creams or puddings. I go over what worked for me below, and you can also see what happened when I experimented with this cream in the video below.

For tartlets, I had to experiment a bit to get these right.

The first attempt was to mimic the Dalgona coffee drinks themselves, by just dolloping or piping coffee cream on top of pastry cream. But the coffee cream is really intense; it only contains 3 ingredients and the bitterness is too strong. Without the cup of milk below to dilute it, the coffee cream overpowered the rest of the dessert.

In the second attempt, I wanted to dilute the coffee cream with whipped cream. It turned out to be a curdled mess because the coffee cream, likely a stabilized foam using hydrophilic ingredients, was destabilized by the fat in the whipped cream. I’m guessing this was the case, but from what I’ve been reading the foam in the coffee cream is not really well understood.

In my third attempt, I used about ½ cup of coffee cream in the pastry cream and it turned out fabulous. Creamy with a great coffee aroma, the only downside is perhaps its color. Brown foods are always unappealing, but the taste really offset any of those disadvantages.

How to make these Dalgona coffee tartlets:

You’ll need:

one recipe of my tart dough

one recipe of my vanilla bean pastry cream

whipped cream, which is 1 cup of cold heavy cream with 1 TB of granulated sugar beaten until stiff peaks form

Dalgona coffee cream, which is listed below the video. Use 1/2 of the recipe below and save the rest for a drink after all your hard work ;)

Here is the complete video tutorial on how to make Dalgona coffee tartlets: