chocolate moussetakes

This is the last weekend before a month away from home, and a kitchen.

In order to keep the challenge on track, I've stockpiled a few challenges, which means we've been eating like crazy for the last two weeks! The recipes will keep coming, as will lots of pics of delicious European food from each of the countries we visit.


For this week, we started our evening with pan seared scallops with chilli and parsley, served with a wasabi mayonnaise. The quality of the scallops was out of this world. Huge, sweet and succulent.


I made some french fries to go with them.





For main course, I made a wild mushroom lasagne. I made the pasta from scratch (really happy with this recipe now. So easy and much, much nicer than bought pasta!).


For this week's cooking challenge, I decided to try my hand at those delicious melting middle chocolate fondent cakes. As usual, I did quite a bit of research, and found a recipe that seemed good. But it didn't work! I tried it three times, just to be sure, and got the same result. Here's the thing - it was still so nice. Perfect flavour. Really chocolatey, and with the consistency of pudding, but I'm reluctant to publish the recipe until I work out exactly what I did wrong for melting cakes, and right for chocolate pudding.

D still ate it, all three unsuccessful batches (!), and with great gusto too! I served it with homemade chilli and orange cream, to balance the sweetness.

So, I've shelved that challenge for now, and instead made a chocolate mousse. I had a bit of a disaster with that as well (not sure what was happening this week) but managed to bring it back from the brink, with really surprising results. I totally embellished a traditional mousse recipe, but we loved it.

Will I make this again? Hmmm. Maybe. It's a nice recipe in that it can be made well in advance and it is quick, and easy and tastes amazing. I think I'm just more of a savoury girl than sweet tooth.

dd.x