A Chocolate Dessert for We Should Cocoa

Is it a mousse? Is it a trifle? It could be a trousse or a moufle, but it is definitely a delicious dessert, whatever you call it! This dessert was made in response to this month's We Should Cocoa theme, which is to make something chocolate flavoured, inspired by cocktails.

Whenever I think of cocktails, in addition to more than one type of alcohol, I think of layers and fruit, so a trifle-type of layered dessert soon dominated my thoughts on the subject. After ideas of terrines and layered cakes were rejected, I decided to build up layers of flavour in a glass, so that the dessert looked cocktail-like too.

Here we have poached pears and cubes of flourless chocolate hazelnut cake mixed with Disaronno liqueur (Amaretto), covered with a light chocolate mousse flavoured with coffee liquid and liqueur, topped with chantilly cream and finished off with grated 100% cacao.

The cake, which incidently, is delicious on it's own with chantilly cream, was made from this Fiona Cairns recipe, without the ganache topping. It's a little fragile but very rich and moist. The mousse was inspired by this recipe on Nigella Lawson's website, although I changed the proportions of cream to chocolate to give a lighter mousse, and replaced the orange flavour with a tablespoon of Tia Maria and a tablespoon of strong coffee. I used 100g of chocolate and 150mls double cream. I found this method of making a chocolate mousse with cream much easier than others I've tried.

The rest of the recipe is a bit vague. I divided 3 small  poached pears, about a third of the cake and the mousse into 6 small portions, but you could make 4 larger portions or one dessert in a trifle bowl with similar amounts, or vary the proportions to use up more of the cake. Each individual dessert got a teaspoon of Disoronno over the cake and chopped pears in the bottom of the glass. The chantilly cream was just double cream whipped with vanilla extract and a little caster sugar.

Each element of this dessert was delicious, and blended together to give a glorious effect overall. The only change I would make in future would be to use more coffee in the mousse to get a stronger coffee flavour. If I were naming this as a cocktail, I think I would call it 'Autumn Dream', because of the pears and hazelnuts used.

The We Should Cocoa Challenge (rules here) is hosted jointly by Chele from Chocolate Teapot and Choclette from Chocolate Log Blog. This month's challenge, to be inspired by cocktails, was set by Choclette to celebrate two years of the We Should Cocoa blogging event. The round-up of entries will be on Chocolate Log Blog at the end of the month.