Nutella and blueberry chocolate mousse cake – with caviar fruit

I am a huge fan of layered cakes. It is like having several cakes at once. But I won’t lie, making these is a big time commitment and it generates a lot of dishes. One day, if I ever decide to take my baking seriously, I will invest in some decent equipment to make these look nicer, but for home baking, a springform tin works fine, lined with baking paper up the edges to keep everything together. The fun part of thinking about recipes like this is the flavour combinations.

This one combines some of my favourite flavours in fruit and chocolate. It has a chocolate sponge base, that is topped with a crunchy hazelnut praline, with a layer of Nutella mousse (surprisingly light and balanced with mascarpone cheese), topped with a layer of blueberry and white chocolate mousse, which is all finally topped with some white chocolate cream. I have previously made a layered white chocolate and raspberry cake with fresh fruit, so this time I stepped it up a level to use fruit caviar, which gives the fruit punch, with a really consistent and defined shape and an even texture. The fruit caviar is folded through the blueberry white chocolate mousse and dotted over the top of the finished cake.

I’ll help with the maths here. You need nearly 600 ml cream for this! Eeep! 

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Strawberry and white chocolate mousse

This is one of those great desserts that can be made ahead and made in a hurry. It’s egg free and can be served after an hour or so in the fridge, but will firm up over night and still produce a light and fluffy mousse.

Sometimes I will make a simple crumb base to add a bit of extra texture (blitz some plain biscuits with a little melted butter and spoon into the bottom of each serving bowl before adding the mousse on top), but this is entirely optional!

For these ones, I sprinkled some grated chocolate on the top for a bit of colour.

I updated my little banner this morning – realised it was still in its ‘summer’ mode even though today is the first of August, zero degrees C outside and rain forecast! Yes, it has been THAT long since I posted a recipe. But here we go, something to lift the soul and sweeten the heart.