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My mother-in-law is a great cook, and one of our traditions is that she makes a big, intricate meal on December 25th. This year, I had offered to make dessert — so the pressure was on!

When I left my (previous) job in June, my colleagues had, very generously, collected quite a chunk of cash to spend on baking tools. One of the things I bought was the Kit Tarte Ring Fleur — a set of six 8cm tartlet rings and a silicon mold for six flower shapes. I decided that I would use this: a tartlet filled with ganache and topped with strawberry mousse!

In advance, I made the strawberry mousse. I used this recipe, mainly because it is one of the few that doesn’t use gelatin. I dislike gelatin — it is often the only ingredient in a mousse that makes it non-vegetarian, and there is a vegan alternative in the form of agar-agar. But reading the recipe made me angry: why do American recipes use those terrible volumetric measurements? “1 cup of strawberries” — well, how large are your strawberries!? If they’re large, you might be able to fit three in a cup, but if they’re smaller, you’ll pack a lot more in a cup — and thus the amount of strawberry will vary a lot. And I’m used to precise measurements with precise instructions (pastry baking, after all).

And I get it: Americans are burdened with that horrible weight system that is completely un-intuitive. But putting a completely un-intuitive volumetric system on top of that is not going to make things better. You all should just switch to metric and weigh your ingredients. Please. Get with the program.

(The first time I made this recipe, I had too much, so I used these amounts for the second time around: 200 grams of (frozen) strawberries; 40 gr sugar; 190 ml cream, 20 gr powdered sugar; 4 gr agar-agar; 160 gr white chocolate and 35 gr cream.)

Piping the mousse into the mold, shaking vigorously to release all air bubbles. Then it went into the freezer!

The cool thing about these tartlet rings is that they are perforated, and if you use them in combination with one of Sililomart’s air mats, which are perforated as well, you don’t have to bake the tartlet shells “blind”! I used this recipe for the tartlet shells — they use the same tartlet rings in the instructions, so that was certainly convenient. The dough is finnicky though: if it’s too cold, it breaks. But if it’s too warm, it’s sticky. I haven’t gotten the right procedure down yet, but I have some new insights every time I try, to make the next time better.

But overall, I was satisfied with these four.

I whipped up a ganache with bitter-sweet chocolate. It was nice and shiny, but too warm to pipe it into the shells. So I put it into the fridge, and then it was too stiff…

The solution was to pipe the stiff ganache into the shells. Then stick a spoon into a mug of hot water, wipe it off carefully (chocolate and water don’t mix!) and press the back of the hot spoon down on the stiff ganache to soften it and spread it out.

Then it was a question of carefully unmolding the mousse and putting them on top of the ganache.

It looks really nice! I might experiment with those shiny glazes to kick it up a notch, but that’s something for another round.

We had thought it would be really heavy (there is a lot of cream and chocolate in there!) but the crunchy cookie of the shell, the slight bitterness of the ganache and the sweetness of the mousse made for a balanced dessert. I’m going to be making this more often, and maybe experiment with other fruits in the mousse (once I get through the bag of frozen strawberries we have in the freezer right now).

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.