I’m not very good at making cake. Well, at the actual *baking* of the cake, I am ok, but I am not great at decorating. Much better at cupcakes. 🙂 But, once per year, I do actually make a cake, and seeing the combination of chocolate and coconut is one of my favorites, I decided to make this one here. The Mountain of Malt Balls is to hide my not-so-pretty frosting job.
Just wrapping up the Christmas Celebrations in my world and thought I would post a recipe for a spectacularly simple chocolate mousse as our Christmas Day dessert. This really just took 20 minutes to put together and even if you only have an hour to chill it, it is great (better if you can chill it for 4+ hours). For something this simple, it comes off as impressive and is lovely and light.
Here is my unsolicited piece of advice for fruit pie baking: cook the fillings separately. There are lots of reasons that this is a good idea, but most importantly, if you are baking a two crust pie (top and bottom), pies have a tendency to dome; that is, you fill them full of raw fruit and then when the fruit condenses in the baking process, you have a top crust that sits above (or collapses on to) the pie. If you cook the filling ahead of time, then you’ve already removed much of the water from the equation. Another bonus of cooking the filling separately is that you can do it up to a week in advance, so you aren’t pressed for time on the day of, or the day before, the holiday. Fair warning though, you will need double as much fruit than if you use raw in your pie. For example, this 9-inch pie used a full 14 medium sized apples (my non-pre-cook recipe uses about 8 apples).
These are not Christmas Cookies. OK, they aren’t Christmas Cookies this year as they were just an experiment to see how they worked out. Every year I do try to add a new cookie type to the Christmas Cookie Madness, but I try them out first before hand. These turned out lovely and I think they work well as a harvest / Thanksgiving-type cookie as well. Lots of orange and cranberry flavor.