Pistachio Mousse Cake

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You can find this post (and more!) over at my new home: 
http://berrynutritious.com.au/2016/05/pistachio-mousse-cake/

If you asked me about cake fails, the first one that comes to mind would be the first chocolate cake I ever made where everything that could have gone wrong pretty much did. We all have to start from somewhere don't we?.

The second, more recent, one that comes to mind would be my first attempt at the pistachio mousse cake. Sure I've burnt a fair amount of cakes and cookies, curdled more custards than I should, made some very odd shaped cakes here and there and regularly bake things that go straight into the bin. But nothing is quite as memorable as the impressive looking, perfectly moulded pistachio mousse cake that five minutes after removing the mould, slowly drooped into a puddle of pudding. It was my first time using sheet gelatin you see- and I'd heated it too much so that it no longer set the mousse like it was supposed to.

Oops.

But I take every failure as a learning experience, and if anything, at least overheating gelatine leaves is a mistake I'll be repeating again anytime soon and the one thing I made sure not to do on my second attempt at this cake. Mind you, I was still pretty nervous when I unmoulded the cake this time around!

Pistachio is one of my favourite flavours, so pistachio themed desserts have always been on my list of things to make though I've shied away from it because pistachio paste is so difficult to find, and my blender has never been any good at making nut butters.

But it turns out making a pistachio paste that isn't as smooth as it should be still works- even if the paste doesn't look quite right, once you mix it into the custard batter, it looks fine and tastes amazing!

Ice cream was the first dessert on my mind when it came to pistachio but I couldn't resist making this cake after seeing it in one of my Asian cookbooks. The book features a selection of recipes from pastry chefs in Japan, and this particular recipe comes from a Patisserie La Page . The original is a much fancier single serve cake but I didn't have the equipment nor the skill to replicate it so I did my own thing.

The cake is made on a base of almond biscuit, with a layer of pistachio pudding within the mousse. I'm sure the original version uses food colouring because my pistachio pudding and mousse looked nothing like the pictures. The original version also has a second almond base layer as well as a sprinkle of green icing sugar or something but I couldn't figure out what it was since the recipe was in Chinese so I omitted them. And because of my limited ability to read Chinese, I also made up the instructions myself so I can't guarantee they are correct.

But even if the method I used wasn't 100% correct, it was probably pretty close as it did make an amazing tasting cake. If I had a better blender, it'd probably be a little smoother, but otherwise the mousse had a nice fragrant pistachio taste, without being overly sweet.

Definitely one of my favourite recipes at the moment- well worth the effort, even if it me two attempts to get it right!

Find the recipe on my new site: http://berrynutritious.com.au/2016/05/pistachio-mousse-cake/