I don’t eat a lot of desert, but when I do, it needs to be out of the ordinary and spectacular. It must;-) because I don’t want to waste those hours on a treadmill for nothing…Luckily the only desert that I really love are the homemade kind and the one from true French Patisserie so i am safe… I only indulge whenever I go out of town or when I made my own deserts. Since on the week-end, i let myself indulge a little more, I decided  to create une verrine ( desert served in a  shot glass). I got my inspiration from a French cookbook called “verrines sucrees” from the ESI Editions. Their verrine was a plain mascarpone mousse whereas mine is made with chocolate ( chocolate makes everything taste better:-)

Ingredients for 6 big glasses or 15 small shot glasses:

For the caramel: 120 gr of sugar, 50 gr of salted butter, 80ml or 2.5 oz of heavy cream.

Place a small saucepan on a stove on medium-high heat, and put half of the sugar in the pan. When the sugar is starting to melt and is bubbling, add the rest of the sugar and stir with a wooden spoon. When the sugar is turning into a light brown caramel, remove it from the stove, add the melted butter and the cream ( it needs to be warm so as to prevent  splashing). Mix well and set aside.

Tiramisu mousse: 3 eggs, 60 gr. of sugar, 1 box of mascarpone, 6 shortbread cookies or sables bretons crumbled, 8oz of bittersweet chocolate( preferebly ghiradhelli).

Place the chocolate in a microwave safe bowl and microwave for 2 minutes. Stir to make it smooth and set aside to cool. Separate the yolks from the egg whites. In a large sauce pan, bring some water to boil. When the water is boiling, lower the temperature and place the bowl with the egg yolks and the sugar on top of the boiling water. Keep the egg yolks over the steaming water until the yolks are warm to the touch, but make sure to stir so that the egg yolks will not curd. When the yolks are warm and the sugar has almost melted, place the bowl on your mixer and beat the egg yolks until they triple in volume and become whitish.  Slowly add the mascarpone and the melted but cool chocolate.

In another bowl, beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks, and incorporate them into the mascarpone mixture.

To create the verrine, fill the verrine with the chocolate/ mascarpone mixture up to half of the glass. Top with shortbread crumbles, then with the caramel. Then fill up the glass with more chocolate mascarpone mixture. Sprinkle some powder cocoa, and some chocolate shavings or raw chocolate crumbs. Place the verrrine in the fridge to chill for a minimum of 3 hours. After that, devour;-)

Bon Appetit and Happy Cooking!!!