Who doesn’t love a fancy cake, but who has the time and patience to make them? Alice Medrich’s cookbook “Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts” is a game-changer for anyone who wants to learn to lighten up their cakes and other baking without failing 5 times before they succeed. And this white chocolate Charlotte mousse cake with its layers of ladyfingers, strawberries and mousse is a perfect example, even though I made it dairy-free with plant-based white chocolate chips and gluten-free flour… which I know Alice Medrich would hate. (She and I share a dislike of people who change a well-tested recipe on the first try, without even following it once to figure out what it’s supposed to taste like before making your own variations. It’s presumptuous to assume that your imagined version will be better, and worse to blame the recipe when your variation fails. I’m done ranting now…)
Even nowadays when low-fat is nose-wrinkled at by some, this discontinued cookbook takes the cake. (Horrible pun.)
It’s a ladyfinger liner filled with a dairy-free white chocolate mousse and topped with more ladyfingers. Those vertically sliced strawberries make it oh-so-pretty. I clearly overcooked the ladyfingers a bit (I blame the gluten-free flour and the baking sheet thickness), and I’m not convinced I used the right white chocolate for the mousse (I ended up using a bag of vegan white chocolate chips because they were the only white chocolate I could find without dairy, so the mousse was essentially like eating a bag of white chocolate chips…which my parents loved because felt way too rich to me, even with the acidity of the plain strawberries cutting through).
That sorbet next to the cake? That’s my invention. A cantaloupe frozen custard. Basically a hybrid of sorbet and ice cream: with eggs but without the dairy or vegan milk. I heated chunks of cantaloupe with sugar and water, puréed and strained it, added it in a thin stream to whisked egg yolks to temper, then whisked the egg yolks back into the pot to thicken. Then, because I didn’t have my Gelataio 1600 ice cream maker anymore, I froze it in ice cube trays for about 4 hours, then blended it with an immersion blender in a tall, narrow cup, then re-froze in ice cube trays, and rebounded again before it frozen completely, then refroze again in a freezer-proof container.
It was SO smooth. And SO creamy. I’d eat that cantaloupe ice cream any day.
But the white chocolate mousse cake was the showstopper for most. The trick is getting the landyfinger layer around the outside, which you do by shaping it to the inside of a spring-form pan while it’s still warm. I put some glasses inside to keep it pressing against the sides. You have the ladyfingers slightly connected in the pan from baking them close together, so the mousse can’t spill out between them.
Theoretically.
Nonetheless, the cake worked and didn’t ooze at all because of the cocoa butter in the white chocolate. Assembling it was super fun, especially when the bottom and top layers actually fit. Once the mousse solidifies in the fridge, it’s not going anywhere. It’s basically reconstituted chocolate chips, and those do not melt easily, even in Arizona heat.
All in all, great success. Thanks, Ms. Medrich. And sorry.
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