Berry Chocolate Mousse

I made a big batch of sweet crust pastry and kept it in the freezer for whenever I felt like baking something. Then I thawed a batch in the fridge last week, not really sure what I wanted to make. It was sitting in the fridge for a couple of days and I thought I should just bake some tart cases and maybe fill it with créme pâtissière and top it with fresh berries. 

Sweet crust tart cases.

 Then I was flipping the Bourke Street Bakery recipe book and found a chocolate mousse tart recipe which looked quite interesting. The recipe used raspberry puree as the filling but I thought I will make mine a little different, I used frozen mixed berries because that was what I had.

Folding in the whipped cream into the chocolate mixture. 

 The recipe used 55% dark chocolate but I only had 72% dark chocolate, so once again I changed the recipe to suit my kitchen cabinet ingredients. Since I wanted to use frozen berries, I thought I should apply a thin layer of melted chocolate on the surface of the tarts as a protection from the moisture of the berries. The recipe says that the timing was important for making the mousse, so I wrote down every step before I started. 

The chocolate was melted with some cream, the egg yolks were whisked with the sugar over a pot of simmering water, the egg white was whisked to soft peak. The remainder of cream was whipped to soft peak. Then comes the mixing in of ingredients. The warm egg yolk was mixed into the warm chocolate, it has to be warm so that the mix doesn't cease. Then the soft whipped cream and whipped egg white are folded into the chocolate mixture. At this point, you could pour the chocolate mousse into cups and set it in the fridge. For today, I refrigerated it for 4hours before piping into the tart cases. 

Berry Chocolate Mousse Tart.

 I placed some frozen berries into the tart cases before piping the chocolate mousse to cover the berries. I tried a couple of designs, a plain nozzle one as well as a star tip nozzle. Then I also made some chocolate decorations to make it a little prettier. I tried dusting icing sugar on the tart because it looked really brown and dull but the icing sugar melted into the mousse. Haha.... not very smart eh! So I placed a few sprigs of mint leaves to give it some colour. 

Hidden berries.

 For the star rosette tart, I added some fresh strawberries to freshen the look up and it was delicious with the strawberries. The strawberries gave it a little tang and cuts through the rich chocolate flavour. The frozen berries were a bit too frozen when we ate it the first night which wasn't too nice. On the second night, they soften and the flavour had time to mingle in the fridge overnight. The taste and texture were much better the next day. 

Fresh strawberries as garnish.

A piece of tart for you?