Chocolate Mousse Cake with Raspberries

The Passover baking challenge isn't that you can't use flour--there are plenty of desserts that don't include flour.  But so many of them end up heavy with too much almond or matzo meal or too fudgy chocolate creations.  And it's not that they're not good, but after a big meal, sometimes you don't want something quite as dense.  This cake is impressive in its height, with hints of Grand Marnier cream and raspberries peeking out from between the layers.  And when you slice into it, it's surprisingly soft and light, like mousse, but still deeply chocolatey.  I've made moussse cakes before, but this recipe, from Smitten Kitchen, has the great suggestion of freezing the delicate layers when they're cool, so they're easy to handle when you put the cake together.  This also means you can do the more involved part of the cake on one day, and then just put it together a few hours before dinner, and the frozen layers will help keep things cool as they defrost. 

Chocolate Mousse with Raspberries

This is one of my most favorite combinations of all time. Rich, dark chocolate combined with whipped cream and fresh raspberries? Oh yeah. I have to keep telling myself it's much harder to make than it is (really easy), so I don't find myself alone with an entire batch of this and a spoon.

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Triple Chocolate Mousse Cake

Tonight marks the beginning of Passover, and thus it also means no flour in my cooking. For the seder we go to, usually I bring something along the lines of a cheesecake or fruit tart--lighter flavors, at least, after a big meal--made with a nut or matzoh crust. But this year I couldn't resist the lure of this recipe, originally from Cook's Illustrated. The base is a dark, rich flourless mousse cake, which is topped with a semisweet mousse and then a white chocolate mousse. And for everyone out there who thinks they don't like white chocolate, I have two points: a) the white chocolate mousse here is a lighter counterpoint to all the chocolatey richness underneath it, and b) get the good stuff--it makes a huge difference. I topped the cake with chocolate shards, raspberries and blackberries. It's hard, and not entirely appropriate to take pictures of your own food during a dinner party, but I wanted to show the inside of this cake, too. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Chocolate-Irish Cream Mousse

To top off our meal, I made dark chocolate mousse with Baileys Irish Cream. Barring a pot of gold, this is what I want to find at the end of the rainbow. And for those who only want a taste ... I present mini chocolate-Irish Cream shots, in thimble-sized dark chocolate cups.

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