Festive Desserts

I made two desserts for the Christmas period, as something chocolate is obligatory, but my daughter had also asked for a repeat of Dan Lepard's Mont Blanc Layer Cake.

The Mont Blanc Layer Cake recipe, based on meringue, is far too big for just three of us, particularly as it doesn't keep well, so I made a meringue roulade with only 3 egg whites, filled it with a half quantity of the chestnut and ricotta cream and drizzled melted chocolate over the top.

We decided, on trying the dessert, that although it was delicious, we all preferred the crisper meringue of the original recipe, which gives a better textural contrast with the chestnut cream than the soft meringue of the roulade.

For  the chocolate dessert, I made a half-sized quantity of Delia Smith's Chocolate Truffle Torte, which fitted nicely into a 7" (18cm) shallow cake tin. The only departure from the recipe was to use Amaretto liqueur instead of rum.

My daughter also contributed a batch of mince pies, which has become a tradition now. She uses this Mary Berry recipe, which adds dried apricots to the mincemeat and tops the tarts with grated marzipan.

Chocolate Cheesecake

An Easter Eggstravaganza!

Easter wouldn't be Easter, in this household, without chocolate. Not Easter Eggs though - our children quickly caught on that you didn't get much chocolate for your money in an Easter Egg, so our tradition became a Terry's chocolate orange (or something similar) and a chocolate dessert for the weekend. Now that they are adults we've stopped buying chocolate presents, but the tradition of a chocolate dessert lingers on.

I decided on a baked cheesecake because it's fairly light on added sugar, compared to some of the desserts I could have chosen. I picked this recipe from Good Food, because it sounded quite light (despite some of the reviews claiming it was too rich!). The recipe uses cocoa and relatively small amount of plain chocolate to get a good flavour, rather than a lot of chocolate.

As usual, I only used the recipe as a guide to the correct quantities for the cheesecake mixture. I introduced a hint of nuts by adding finely chopped toasted hazelnuts to the biscuit base, and Amaretto liqueur to the cheesecake mix instead of a coffee liqueur. I also used plain chocolate instead of one with coffee flavour.

The base was made from 170g of chocolate and oat biscuits from IKEA, 50g toasted hazelnuts and 60g butter. I reduced the butter a little from the usual 50% of the weight of biscuit because I wasn't sure how absorbent the biscuits would be, and I didn't want the base to be too heavy - I prefer a slightly crumbly base rather than one which is dense and crisp. I followed the recipe for the cheesecake mixture as far as quantities of ingredients were concerned, just making the changes I've already mentioned.

I was rather concerned about how liquid my cheesecake mixture was - the recipe said to smooth the top after pouring it onto the base, but my mixture flowed like custard and certainly didn't need any help from me to become smooth and level. Perhaps because of this, the cheesecake took a little longer to cook than stated in the recipe. It also cracked badly, with one deep crack going right down to the base (which explains why there's no photograph of the whole cheesecake!). When cold, I decorated the top with a drizzle of plain chocolate, rather than the cream and chocolate sauce suggested in the recipe. I thought it better to serve cream as an optional extra, rather than force everyone to eat some.

Although I'd expected this cheesecake to be light, it was very different in texture to what I had hoped for. It was more like a set cheesecake or a mousse than other baked cheesecakes I've made. It still tasted good though, which is the main consideration. The hint of nuttiness was just right, and the chocolate flavour was strong enough without being too rich at the end of a meal.

I didn't really manage to get any good photographs after the cheesecake was cut. By the following morning the remnants were a bit worse for wear  - the chocolate topping was a bit weepy, and the cheesecake was crumbly to cut straight from the fridge. I think this bottom photo shows the texture quite well, despite all that.

I'm entering this cheesecake into the April 'Simply Eggcellent' link-up set by Dom (of Belleau Kitchen); with due consideration for our priorities at Easter, his theme for this month is chocolate.

Lemon and Marzipan Drizzle Cake

Lemon flavoured cakes can be sublime, or fairly pedestrian, but unless you go down routes which mean that lemon is no longer the dominant flavour, then there doesn't seem to be a lot of variation to the recipes available. In the UK there's lemon drizzle cake and in the USA there's lemon pound cake, both either served fairly plainly or made into layer cakes and stuffed with an excess of sugar and/or dairy fat. I'm sure there are other recipes available, but I spent a long time searching online and couldn't find recipes which looked as if they'd make something which turned out much different in texture to those two. The one exception is chiffon cake, but I didn't feel up to tackling that, even if I had a proper chiffon pan!

But this was my birthday and I wanted a fairly simple lemon cake, but with enough of a twist to lift it above being pedestrian. I didn't want to add fruit, either fresh or dried, but nuts were another matter! I almost passed over this recipe from Woman and Home, because it was another drizzle cake, some of which I find too dense and wet. In the end, not finding anything which looked better, I was swayed by what attracted me to the recipe in the first place - the word Marzipan in the title!

I didn't have the ingredients to follow the recipe exactly - I only had three lemons, but they were very large and I didn't have any ground almonds (how on earth did that happen!), although I did have ground hazelnuts, which I thought might be interesting mixed with the flavour of marzipan. The method looked weird to me - surely beating a cake mixture with an electric mixer after the cubes of marzipan had been added would break them up? There may have been a good reason for doing it this way, but as I couldn't see it, I decided to alter things a little. I beat in two of the eggs with the electric mixer before adding the marzipan, then used a spoon to mix in the other two eggs and the rest of the ingredients. To conserve lemon juice for the drizzle, I only added it at the end, with the flour, and only used enough to give the batter a dropping consistency. That left me with the juice of two and a half large lemons to make the drizzling syrup.

I made the syrup as in the recipe, including the amaretto, and although it seemed quite a large volume for the cake to absorb, it did all go in with only a slight hint of moisture escaping out of the bottom of the springform tin. As I didn't have any more lemons to make the glacé icing and decoration, and was in two minds whether I wanted any topping at all, I used a smaller amount of icing sugar and a tablespoon or two of the drizzling syrup to make a glacé icing, which I drizzled over the cold cake. There was enough to pipe a thicker band of glacé around the edge of the cake, which I then sprinkled with chopped toasted hazelnuts.

It wasn't until the cake was cut for serving that I realised why the marzipan was beaten into the cake - it looked as if nearly all of it had sunk to the bottom of the cake, where it made a sticky, but very tasty layer. It was probably meant to be broken up into smaller pieces by the beaters, and then either melt into the cake or stay suspended in the batter!

Apart from this minor fault, the cake was delicious; it was moist, but not as wet as I had feared, and still light in texture, despite the volume of drizzling syrup absorbed. Using the zest of three large lemons gave the cake an intensely lemon flavour, and the amaretto and hazelnuts added an extra dimension to the overall flavour. In the end, we didn't mind finding nuggets of marzipan at the bottom, but they would have been nicer dispersed throughout the cake. Cutting them smaller next time might be the answer!

PS - if anyone can suggest a recipe for a simple cake where the flavour of lemon is predominant, I'd love to hear from you!

Amaretto Truffle Cake

Christmas tradition in this house dictates that there is always one chocolate dessert. It dates back to when the children were smaller and didn't like the dried fruit in Christmas puddings, cake and mince pies. To be honest, they still don't like much of the traditional stuff, although FB will eat mince pies!

This dessert (based on a recipe from Wicked Chocolate by Jane Suthering) was made from a layer of chocolate truffle mixture set on a genoise sponge base and topped with crushed Amaretti biscuits. The sponge cake was sprinkled with coffee and Amaretto liqueur to add to the flavour.

The sponge base was made by beating 2 eggs and 55g caster sugar together until light and fluffy, then 30g plain flour, 2 tablespoons cocoa and 1 tablespoon cornflour were sifted together and folded in, followed by 25g melted butter. The batter was baked in a 22 cm tin, then cooled and trimmed to fit a 20cm tin. After the sponge was fitted into the base of a 20cm springform tin, it was sprinkled with 2 tablespoons each of strong coffee and Amaretto liqueur

The truffle layer was made by creaming 115g unsalted butter and 115g caster sugar together, then beating in 75g cocoa, 3 egg yolks and 200g crème fraiche. Finally a mixture of  85g plain chocolate melted with 2 tablespoons of milk was stirred in. This was spooned over the base and spread level. The top was sprinkled with 100g crushed crisp Amaretti biscuits before the cake was chilled overnight.

The cake was brought to room temperature before serving, and dusted with a mix of cocoa and icing sugar.

This was a sinfully rich chocolate dessert, with layers of contrasting textures and flavours. The Amaretti biscuits stayed crisp (despite my fears that they would go soggy on top of the truffle),  the sponge was soft and light, and in between was a rich, dense truffle layer. The almond flavoured topping and the coffee and Amaretto flavoured base  both helped to lighten the taste of pure chocolate from the truffle layer, a little.

This dessert is my entry to December's We Should Cocoa challenge. This month, Choclette from Chocolate Log Blog, set the challenge of using chocolate and alcohol together - just right for the festive season. The rules for We Should cocoa are best explained by the host, so have a look here if you think you would like to join in, in future.

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.

Chocolate Mousse - A Rescue Mission

What can you do with a bowful of ganache, intended for truffles, which is rock hard at room temperature, crumbly, and showing signs of seizing? Some might throw it into the bin, but I'm a thrifty, frugal cook, and it goes against my nature to throw away 350g of chocolate and double cream (even if FB paid for it, and it was her attempt at truffles which went wrong!)

At first, I thought I could rescue the mixture, and still make truffles, but when I tried to re-melt the chocolate and add more ingredients to make it a softer set, it split terribly, and I ended up with a lump of warm soft chocolate-like goo in a huge puddle of oil. I had added 2 tablespoons of Amaretto Liqueur and 50g of white chocolate in an effort to improve the truffle mix, but once it split so badly, it seemed doomed.

By now, I was thinking of possibly a chocolate sauce, if the mixture could be persuaded to recombine. As a last resort, I tried something which has worked for me before, when making cake frostings, but which is never mentioned as an orthodox remedy for split ganache. I beat the mixture with an electric whisk, while dribbling in cold semi-skimmed milk. After several dribbles of milk (about 4 or 5 tablespoons) I had a lovely bowl of soft ganache, without a hint of splitting.

It seemed a shame to dilute it further to make a sauce, but I wasn't sure it would ever set hard enough for trufles after so much milk had been added, so instead I quickly beat in two egg yolks, and then folded in the stiffly beaten egg whites, to make a mousse. It was still a bit of a gamble as to how well it would set, but I'm pleased to say it made a very light, soft mousse. Because the original chocolate was 85% cocoa solids, and the only added sugar was in the white chocolate and amaretto, it still tasted rich and delicious, although not as deeply chocolatey as a traditional mousse using just eggs and chocolate.