Rhubarb and Ginger

I'm not quite sure what to call this rhubarb and ginger dessert. I thought about calling it a mousse, but it's more than that. Is it a torte? It might be, but the official definition seems to be a multi-layered cake filled with fruit, cream or mousse, and it's not as much as that. It could be a tart, or even a pie, except the ginger crumb base has no sides to support the filling. Can I just leave it like those enigmatic menus which just list the main flavours in a dish?

I made it mainly to fill the brief for this month's Tea Time Treats challenge, which is for a chilled dessert. By adding ginger, I can also enter the AlphaBakes Challenge for August, which is to use the letter G, and rhubarb and ginger are such wonderful partners anyway, that I'm always happy to put them together.

The base was the standard biscuit crumb mixture of 2 parts crumbs, 1 part butter and a little added sugar. 200g of biscuits was far too much crumb mix for my 18cm tin, which is why there are extra ginger crumbs sprinkled around the finished dessert - 150g of gingernuts would have been enough. I baked the base for 10 minutes at 180C, then cooled and chilled it before adding the mousse topping.

The mousse was a fairly rudimentary affair - 500g rhubarb, cooked and puréed and sweetened to taste. After puréeing, I whisked 2 egg yolks and 4 sheets of softened gelatine into the hot mixture. When the fruit mixture had cooled to room temperature, but before it set too solid, I folded in 4 finely chopped balls of stem ginger,  125mls of double cream, whipped to soft peaks and 2 stiffly beaten egg whites. I cooled the mixture further, before pouring it onto the ginger base, in the hope that the ginger would stay suspended rather than sinking to the bottom - that idea worked! (I will also confess that I added a few drops of pink food colouring - cooked unforced rhubarb is not an attractive colour this far into the season!)


I could have done more to decorate the mousse, and make it prettier, but if I'd piped more cream on, then FB wouldn't have eaten it. I added some more thinly sliced stem ginger and served each portion with roast rhubarb and some of the leftover ginger crumbs, with cream available separately for those who wanted it.







The Tea Time Treats challenge (rules here), to produce something for the tea table, is hosted jointly by Karen at Lavender and Lovage, and Kate at What Kate Baked. Kate is the host this month, and will post a round-up of all the chilled desserts offered as entries, at the end of the month.

AlphaBakes (rules here) is a challenge based on a randomly chosen letter of the alphabet. The dish made must feature something beginning with that letter as one of the main ingredients or part of the name. It is hosted jointly by Ros at The More Than Occasional Baker and Caroline at Caroline Makes. Ros is the host this month, with the letter G, and as usual will post a round-up of entries at the end of the month.