Chocolate Coconut Mousse

Thank you to Arielle from With all my Affection for sharing this super easy to make chocolate mousse.

This takes 5mins to make and tastes absolutely delicious.

Ingredients:

Yes, only three ingredients!
–  x2 cans of 160g coconut cream
– 50g cocoa powder
– three tablespoons icing sugar
(makes 6 small servings)

The original recipe says to use a tin of coconut milk left in the fridge overnight and separating the thicker ‘cream’ from the water.  A few reviews said that it came out too watery so I decided to use coconut cream instead which is the same thing with less water. I did still leave it the fridge overnight.

Empty the coconut cream into a bowl and sieve in the cocoa powder and icing sugar (I altered the quantities slightly). I was initially apprehensive as it seemed really watery initially and wasn’t sure if it’d thicken up.

After a few mins of whisking it had thickened up nicely and had a moussy consistency. I should have piped it into my serving dishes but was feeling lazy so spooned it in.

It tasted really chocolatey with a subtle hint of coconut.

This is a great recipe for when you need a quick dessert hit, and its vegan/dairy free/egg free (if you are making it for someone who suffers from dairy allergies make sure the cocoa powder doesn’t contain whey).

This would also taste delicious omitting the cocoa powder and using vanilla essence.

Indian Summer

No Indian wedding would be complete without lots of love, laughter, colour and lots and lots of FOOD.

My next few post will be about the treats I made for my brothers wedding over the Summer.

Most of these were made for the dessert table for the ladies mendhi (henna) party.

some of the mendhi patterns of the night

Mendhi madness

The gorgeous mendhi was applied by Sheena and Raya, who both did the most beautiful designs and really paid attention to what each person wanted.

And this is dessert table I (with some help of my sisters) did:

Out of all my baking projects over the last few years this was my favourite and the one I’m most proud of. I was so happy with how it looked when put together and all the different desserts/sweets looked and tasted amazing.

Paisley Cakes
The ‘paisley’ is so common in mendhi patterns. I knew these cakes would go perfectly on my table.

To make them extra special I painted the flaked almonds gold using food paint before sprinkling on top.

They looked so beautiful on my cupcake display.

Chocolate Brownie Hearts
I made my normal brownies, plain chocolate flavour in shallow baking sheets (I usually make them in a square cake 20cm tin).

I left the brownies to cool, then using heart cutters cut them out.

I did want to dip them in melted chocolate and sprinkle edible heart confetti … but ran out of time.

They still looked cute and were the perfect little chocolatey, fudgey morsels.

Sweet Cones
Ok, no baking involved. But thought I’d include these.

I make these as a thank you gift for our guests.

I got the cones and curling ribbon from eBay and filled them with marshmellows, jelly sweets, love hearts and lolly pops.

They were really easy to make and made a great gift for kids and adults alike.

The cake pops and individual banofee pies were made by my sister, I made the fruit skewers, and the small crescent and iced cakes were a gift from a friend.

Mini Tiramisu Cakes

I’m really enjoying the repeats of Lorraine Pascales ‘Baking Made Easy’ on Food Network. She makes everything look so easy.

I’ve taken it as a sign that the episode where she makes these Mini Tiramisu Cakes is always on, and decided with my coffee by my side to give them a go. 

I really need to stop listening to my mug

Ingredients:

After preparing the batter, rather than using a muffin tin/muffin cases, I used my Lakeland Mini Sandwich Tin as I wanted to make them look like miniature cakes not cupcakes.

There was, however, plenty of batter left over, so I made 6 cupcakes out of it.

While the cakes were cooling I made the filling (substituting the marsala for a few spoons of coffee dissolved in water, also, if you are piping instead of scooping the filling … 350g of mascarpone should be enough..I had loads left over and made some trifles with the amaretti biscuits). And the syrup, which started of quite watery but thickens as it cools.

Once cool enough I cut them in half (and also had a little try, a really moist cake with a none overwhelming coffee flavour.  Unfortunately the Amaretti seemed to soften/dissolve into the cake, however, you could taste the almond) and brushed syrup over both halves.

Once fully cooled, time to fill.  Lorraine uses an ice cream scoop and puts a huge dollop of the mascarpone to sandwich the two halves.  I felt that was too much and decided to pipe.

And to finish a dusting of icing sugar:

I was really impressed by these, a really good cake made super moist by the syrup and with the mascarpone filling with it soft bits of Amaretti biscuits it tastes just like Tiramisu.

Tiramisu

I had been wanting to make a non-baked dessert for a while, I decided on Tiramisu while watching repeats of ‘Nigellas Kitchen’.

When looking for recipes I was split between ‘quick’/’cheats’ Tiramisu; which didn’t use any eggs or ‘real’/’authentic’ which did. Cream or no cream. Only Egg yolk or egg yolks and egg whites.

Confusing and off-putting.

A few months later, when I was completely caked out (October tends to do that to me, my next few posts will explain why, religious celebrations/lots of birthdays) but still craving sweets, I decided to revisit Tiramisu.

I decided on Anna Olsens recipe as I had seen that episode and remember dribbling over it, and to help me with quantities one from Bakers Royale(which is a great blog I recently discovered).

I prepared a mug of strong instant coffee and left that aside to cool, I didn’t add sugar as I don’t like sweet coffee and felt bitter coffee would be a nice contrast to the sweet mascarpone cream (I needed an extra half mug).

For the mascarpone cream:
– 100g caster sugar
– 3 eggs
– 1 extra egg yolk
– 225g mascarpone
– 1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Separate the three eggs, and whisk all the egg yolks with the sugar and vanilla over a water bath, until the mixture is a pale yellow and the sugar has melted (i.e. You can’t see any sugar granules). When reading the recipes, I did find the whole water bath idea worrying, it sounded like effort and I was worried about cooking the eggs, but it was fine 🙂
This should take a few minutes. Give it a few minutes to cool the whisk in the mascarpone until smooth, it will initially resemble scrambled eggs but will delump (a few recipes said to whisk the mascarpone then whisk into the egg mixture, but I wanted to use as few bowls as possible, I hate washing dishes!)
In a separate bowl (unfortunately the second bowl can’t be avoided) whisk the eggs whites till they are at stiff peaks. Put one – two spoons of the egg whites into the mascarpone/yolk mix and fold in, then spoon the rest in carefully fold in.
Leave aside for assembly.

I used Savoiardi biscuits (Italian lady’s fingers), one pack would have been enough if I didn’t eat a load of them (quality control *ahem*). Dip the biscuit in the coffee, once soaked (which is pretty much immediately) quickly place in your serving dish.
Once the dish is lined cover with half of the mascarpone cream.

I then added my own twist, and sprinkled grated Lindt Coffee Intense over the mascarpone cream. This gave the Tiramisu a great texture, especially with the coffee bean granules in the chocolate.

Place another layer of sponge fingers topped with the rest of the mascarpone cream and sprinkled with more grated chocolate.

To finish the dessert I topped it with a layer of double cream. I whisked a tub (250ml) of double cream till it was at soft peaks, I then sifted two tablespoons of icing sugar and a few teaspoons of coffee (to taste) and whisked til slightly thicker and then spread over the top.

The cream probably would have looked prettier if I had piped it. Or I could have used a stencil and dusted cocoa over it.

As this was made when I was in a greedybutlazy mood, I just grated the rest of the chocolate on top.

This was chilled and eaten about three hours later (like I said, greedy mood), and was very good, however, when I ate some leftovers (I know, shocking!) the next day it tasted even better.
I would definitely recommend patience and chilling it over night.