If you day is that dire that you just need chocolate, scroll to the bottom for the recipe. Stat.
If you have time for shilly shallying, read on. These dense pomegranate chocolate pots can bring you back from the brink. I promise. I’m sending you a postcard from there.
I’m sending a post card from a place where toddlers are welcoming eye teeth and nursing rattling coughs and sticky colds (which they’re happy to share). Where the reason they’re repeatedly slamming their head against the floor is because you, their dastardly mother, dared to deny them the pleasure of drinking hand sanitiser.
It’s a place of weeks of torrential rain, missing electricity and neighbours whose version of a 50th birthday party involves wall pulsing house music until 5 am.
It’s a place of stubbed toes and leaking taps, mouth ulcers, forgotten bills and lost keys. It’s those days when your hormones bubble and froth and you find yourself having a not-so-silent little weep in downward dog during your weekly (usually sanity saving) yoga class.
My mother is always good at offering perspective. ‘Nobody has cancer. You don’t live in Nepal’. She’s right. But some days really, really call for chocolate.
When those days descend, might I suggest you turn to this mousse?
I’m not the first person on the interwebs to suggest the alchemic muddling of avocado and cocoa (or raw cacao, if you’re feeling virtuous/flush). Yet be careful here. In a clumsy mashing it can resemble what my son would render if left unsupervised in the kitchen; a brown, disappointing, dirty slurry.
But with a careful hand, it’s a touch of genius. In the right proportions the cocoa trumpets straight over the vegetal strains of the avocado, leaving it free to concentrate on offering a silky (dairy free) texture. What it needs is some supporting players. Vanilla helps. So does honey (or rice malt or maple syrup). That adds the necessary sweetness. All that’s left is to balance the chord- you need a touch of acid to bring it into line. Might I suggest pomegranate molasses and a twinkle of salt? (Though you could also use a good quality balsamic).
It’s rich and indulgent and you’d never know it was made from a green orb you lobbed in your shopping basked intended as a topping for toast. I promise. I polled guests at a recent dinner party and nobody twigged.
It’s eminently adaptable; sneak some additional vegetables and good fats into your offspring, please your paleo pals, use it as a frosting for cakes, top it with crumbled cookies and poached pears (we had it this way to celebrate Anzac Day), or layer it with berries and slices of booze soused chocolate black bean cake for a trifle.
Or, take my lead; festoon it with pomegranate pearls and hide in the kitchen and eat a whole portion just to yourself at 4.22 pm, because it’s the only way the seratonin levels are going to stay sufficiently high to get through the rest of your evening – until such time as you can pour a fat gin and tonic and brand the day a wash.
Dairy and Egg Free Chocolate Pomegranate Mousse
Serves 2 (though easily scales for a crowd)
(Nb, can be easily adapted to raspberries, or other red berries. Can also substitute good quality balsamic vinegar for the pomegranate molasses)
Shopping/foraging
1 ripe avocado, seed and skin removed
3 tbsp cocoa powder/raw cacao
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp pomegranate molasses
3 tbsp honey (or rice malt syrup/maple syrup)
pinch of sea salt
pomegranate seeds or raspberries to garnish
Here’s how we roll
1) Combine all the ingredients in a blender or food processor. Blend until you have a smooth slurry, stopping to scrape down the sides occasionally.
2) Taste and adjust the seasoning. Add a little more sweetness, acidity or salt if it calls for it.
3) Portion into glasses and top with pomegranate pearls or fresh berries. Can eat straight away, or store in the fridge.
[yumprint-recipe id=’4′]
This look absolutely delicious! Thank you for the recipe. i’ll have to try this myself sometime soon!
The point of the Paleo diet is, and I feel some people forget this, to not only diet, but to eat delicious foods at the same time. It’s the only diet I’ve come across that cuts out food groups, yet still focusses on everyone’s need to eat great food.
I’m a real foodie, and would not survive on any other diet, but Paleo has been very good for me. I’ve written about one of my favourite cookbooks: http://cookbook-reviews.net/review-the-paleo-recipe-book/