Donna... I trusted you! Chocolate mousse meringue cake

This is one of the saddest posts I've ever had to write. Donna Hay failed me, not just once - but twice. Now I can't entirely blame her for the general lack of tarragon in Melbourne - but I think that I can definitely feel annoyed that she told me to fry feta and it melted (duh) and so it was melty and not friedy. Luckily for her, the dish that feta went on still tasted great!

This is tarragon, don't try looking for it anywhere in Melbourne, Australia. There is no point. 

My plan was to blog about the cake that I was making for my dinner party. I was having some dear friends over for wassail and merrymaking. Actual Wassail, not just another way of saying merrymaking. Google it, it's a drink and it's very good. So I decided, in what seems like a foolhardy manner now, to make three new things for the dinner. A beetroot starter, Wassail and this Chocolate mousse meringue cake. I started out taking a few photo's but quickly stopped because I was getting depressed. So here's the cake... I am not including the whole recipe, because it DON'T work. This is a post to let you know that I have failures.. yes, I do. And here one is.

Once upon a time an idealistic girl named Bridgette decided to make a chocolate mousse cake for her friend Christina's birthday. Her eyes shone with the naive glow of a Donna Hay zealot, Bridgette trusted Donna, and no matter what happened - even if Donna turned into a vampire and sucked the blood right from Bridgette's nubile neck, she was still going to trust her. Because, hey, it was Donna and if she needed blood, then she was probably making black pudding.

Bridgette got out her eggs and hazelnut meal and confectioners sugar (yes she has that sort of thing lying around in her cooking cupboard) and she measured out the amounts.

Bridgette: Golly that seems a lot of sugar! Still this is Donna and she knows what she's doing.

Bridgette traced out the circles (same width as the spring form pan) on two bits of greaseproof paper, she turned the oven to 120. Then she mixed. The four eggs whites seemed a bit overwhelmed by 240 gms of confectioners sugar and a further 100 grams of hazelnut meal  - not too mention a tablespoon full of corn flour - at this point I really wish I had a picture for you. It looked like the stuff that you feed pigs with. (Why is it when you Google "pig swill" you get Sean the Sheep?)

I (I'm losing the third person, as this story becomes more depressing I can't keep the chirpy distance going) fashioned it into two circles and popped it in the oven and then went about making other things. Twenty minutes later I had two floppy disks.

No not like this.

Yes, exactly, sob, like this.

Why?!!! Why had my meringue failed to be hard on the top and a delightful light colour. At this point I thought - "Well, I should have known, that was way too much sugar for that to ever get hard - I'll make it again!"

So I drew got our the confectioners blah blah blah, 4 eggs and blah hazelnut, blah, snore fucking blah. I redid the measurements, to what seemed a more reasonable amount. I popped it in the oven and got on with making the mousse part. The mousse was a big success - but frankly with 400 grams of Lindt chocolate in it there was really no other option. If I poured 400 grams of Lindt on dogshit, it would probably be edible.

So.. Round two - ding ding!

I pull the meringues out of the oven. I look at them. Silence. A tumbleweed blows by. Somewhere a dog barks. It looks EXACTLY like the last one! HOWL!!!!!! 

Tweedledum

Tweedle screw yo

So now it's 5pm folks and here are my choices. Get on with putting my main meal in the oven, as it has been stove top and really needs a bit of convection lovin' - or try one more time for my meringue topping. Well, I compromised: I made two brown sugar meringue disks and they worked! They didn't look as lovely as the hazelnut thing was meant to - but they worked.





So 12 eggs later I had my top and bottom for my meringue cake. I assembled it with some difficulty as the mousse centre section had gotten a bit firm and was not really happy about leaving it's bowl - but we spoke, I was really eloquent, and it decided the best thing for everyone was if it GOT INTO THE GODDAMNED SPRINGFORM PAN.

The upshot was that it tasted great actually. The mousse was intense and the meringue actually worked beautifully.But the hazelnut meringue didn't work and I'm not some cooking neophyte, it just doesn't work.