Chocolate Mousse Flower Pots with White Chocolate Carrots

Abbi and I saw these teeny tiny little flowerpots in the garden centre and had to have them.  We thought it would be a nice idea to use them for baking.

I've seen them used with edible flowers on pinterest.  But unfortunately a combination of the fact that our garden is like a barren wasteland after a very wet winter... and that I can kill even artificial flowers meant no chance of edible flowers from there.

You can buy them on line, they are muchos expensive.  Great for a wedding, but a bit much just for an easy dinner party.

n.b.  You can eat any non poisonous flowers so long as you are sure they haven't been sprayed with pesticides.  This rules out any of the supermarket and garden centre flowers.   We did consider using herbs, but the plain green didn't look quite right.

So... we made chocolate carrots instead.

Hmm.

Didn't really work out the way we wanted, and took sooooo much more time than I had thought.

But once you've started, you kind of have to keep going.


We found a chocolate carrot mould on Amazon, and made the carrot shapes.  (This part was easy - about 5 minutes)...then we tried to add the colour.

We couldn't colour the chocolate before it went in the mould, so had to paint it on.....with only marginal success..... (if anyone can tell me a better method, i'd love to know).

Of course we then found some chocolate carrot decorations already made in the supermarket....by wheres the fun and lost 2 hours in that!

Finally, chocolate carrots made and assembled, we made the chocolate mouse.

To make the base earth for the pots, we made chocolate mousse  (I use the Elizabeth David Recipe).

We made this is a separate bowl, and spooned it in when set, as the pots have "drainage holes" and we were worried it would ooze out.

180g good quality chocolate (70% bittersweet is best)
6 medium eggs
4 teaspoons of sugar (adjust to taste)

(Serves 6)

Melt the chocolate over a low heat, and set aside to cool.  Separate the eggs, and whisk the whites until the form soft peaks.  Add the sugar and whack again until incorporated into the white.  

Add the egg yolks to the cooled chocolate and mix.  Whisk a third of the egg whites into the mix.  Finally add the rest of the whites, folding gently in.  Don't over mix or you will lose all the fluffiness. Adding the whites in two stages prevents the streaking effect you can get if you add them all at once. Whack the resultant foamy chocolate delight in the fridge for at least 3 hours until set.

We lined the base of our pots with a circle of greaseproof paper to make a plug, and spooned in the mousse.  

Our pots were quite tiny and these were fairly dainty portions.  We easily got 12 portions, plus extra for Abbi and Jamie!

We then sprinkled our mousse with crumbled oreo (don't ask what happened to all the white oreo filling).

These pudding was quite fun to make. The mousse and biscuit topping was yum, and very easy, but the chocolate carrots were no way worth the time and effort.  Next time if we made these we would use pretty flowers make carrots (and bunnies) with fondant icing....or just buy the ready made chocolate carrots.