Chocolate Mousse - Passion Fruit Cake

Are you still looking for an impressive, but not too difficult cake for Christmas? This could be the one! I made it a few weeks ago, just for me and my husband, in a smaller version. We loved it so much, that I will make it again to bring to our Christmas dinner. For a more Christmas style decoration you can use star cookie cutters in different sizes.

With a little practice this cake is fairly easy to make. You can prepare most of the cake the day before you serve it. Just the chocolate disk is best to put on shortly before serving. To cut the cake it's best to remove the chocolate disk, and cut the cake separately. Then put a piece of the chocolate on each serving.

White Chocolate Coconut Cheesecakes with Passionfruit Glaze

We had beautiful Easter weather today and a lovely day spend with my family. My niece was hunting for Easter eggs outside as we had a beautiful brunch with quiche, my brioche bunnies, colored eggs, carrot muffins and much more. This was followed by a long walk in the blooming forest and a lovely advocaat-chocolate cake from my aunt in the afternoon. As this wouldn't already have been enough we then had an amazing dinner with beef tenderloin, fresh spring carrots and potato gratin. So, we are very happily stuffed right now.

I still wanted to show you these mini-cheesecakes I made two days ago. They are flavored with coconut and have a beautiful passion fruit glaze. When I look at them they just scream sunshine.

If you cannot find quark you should really try to make some yourself. It's really easy and also tastes very good. You can put it on top of baked potatoes or even spread it on your sandwich, and of course make all kinds of German cheesecakes with it. Meeta has a great and simple recipe on her blog which I used often, when I was still living in Canada.

I wish you all a very Happy Easter and hope you found lots of chocolate eggs!

Daring Bakers: Strawberry Pâte de Fruit & Milk Chocolate-Passion Fruit Truffles

It's Daring Bakers time again, and this month's challenge were candies and confections. There was a choice of a wide variety of recipes. One option was the Pâte de Fruit, which is fruit gelée, something I wanted to make for a long time. You can use any fruit, which would be suitable for making jam. The process is also very similar to jam making. You puree the fruit, add sugar and pectin, then boil it until it sets. I thought the recipe given by the organizers was a little too meticulous on temperature measurement. I found another recipe which is a lot easier and doesn't need a thermometer. If you made jam before, it's a really easy treat to make. And they taste fantastic!

My second choice was chocolate truffles. They were dark chocolate filled with a milk chocolate and passion fruit ganache. It was really too hot to make anything with chocolate (how do you maintain the mixture at 27 C when the room temperature is already 30 C?), but I gave it a try anyways. I have made different types of filled chocolates before, but I still find the process of tempering the chocolate intimidating. One reason is that I usually do it by feel, since my thermometer is not very precise. So I usually estimate the temperature with my lips. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This time it didn't go so well, and I got some white streaks on the chocolate. They still tasted very good, though.

I will definitely keep both choices of confections on my list for gift ideas later this year. I hope by then I will have a better candy thermometer.

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drive and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies!