Raspberry Chocolate Mousse Cake

So, my girl's birthday is two days after mine, and since she got me a cake from Dufflet Cakes, I decided to get her a cake from yours truly. It was actually the first time I made a raspberry chocolate mousse cake, or made a mousse from scratch actually. I managed to make this cake at my parent's place, and without a proper spring form pan to boot. In a pinch, I decided to use an empty aluminum food takeout container with the bottom cut out to use as a mold for the mousse, and a guide for the base, I lined it with parchment to keep the mousse from sticking and getting really disgusting.

No spring form pan, no problem. Kind of ugly though.

For the base layer, I used a Dobos Torte recipe from a really great blog called Smitten Kitchen. You can find it here. I basically just cut the recipe into a third as I needed only one small layer. To make the chocolate mousse, I basically followed the directions of John Mitzewich at Foodwishes, he is really, really, really good at creating video recipes that really work. You can see the video below. For the raspberries, you can obviously see them on top, but I also cooked some down with enough water to cover them in a small saucepan until they were soupy then strained them and spooned them onto the base layer. I used a 1/4 pint in total, reserving enough for the top as you can see. I left the cooked raspberries tart, not adding any extra sugar to them as they provide some balance to an otherwise sweet and rich cake.

Double Chocolate Cookie

Pretty and tasty.

So, I think this was perhaps my only saving grace tonight. These cookies were actually quite good, I wasn't sure if they were going to turn out as they looked really wet when I was scooping them onto the baking sheet, but they were alright in the end. I now have a sneaking suspicion that bakers press extra chocolate chunks into the top of still warm cookies to make the chunks more visible and semi-soft rather than melted into the batter and invisible.





Ingredients
Makes 8 big cookies, or 12 smaller ones.


140g Butter
100g White Sugar
40g Brown Sugar
1 Egg


Bowl 2
200g Flour (I still just have bread flour)
1/2 Tsp Baking Soda
75g Cocoa Powder

60g Chocolate
1 Vanilla Pod (Scraped)

1. Cream the butter and sugar, whisk in the egg. Add the vanilla and chocolate. Stir.
2. Stir the ingredients in bowl 2, once mixed, add, 1/3 at a time bowl 2 into bowl 1, stirring to incorporate before adding the next 1/3, and so on.
3. Bake at 375F for about 18 minutes. Allow to cool before eating.

Dessert - Chocolate Pudding

No food today. Just dessert. I think I need to play with this recipe more, but it was really, really good, especially for a first attempt, which it was. This pudding has serious pudding skin issues for example and could have probably been a bit sweeter. I'd also consider adding a small amount of salt instead of sugar when I make it again. The recipe below makes 2 servings as depicted.

1 Cup Milk
1 Egg Yolk
60g Semi-sweet baking chocolate (slivered)
1/2 Tsp Vanilla Extract
1 Tsp Corn Starch

1. Whisk everything in a saucepan constantly on medium heat until the mixture reaches about 82C. Remove from heat. Mixture should thicken almost immediately.

2. Pour into serving dishes and chill in fridge until ready to serve.