Mango: Part Four ~ Mango Mousse Cake ~

This is actually from back in August when I made them for my dad’s birthday dinner, but I had to share since I'm so proud of them! On his birthday, my mom and grandparents were also in town to help my sister move up north, so we all got together at my place to celebrate with some of Obachan’s (grandma's) home cooking and desserts by their favorite pastry chef--me.  At least I tell myself that.

Since it was still summer, I though I’d go with something refreshing. And since I wanted to impress them, I thought I’d be overly ambitious and attempt a recipe by Toshi Yoroizuka, the same chef that created my failed fig mousse cake, although to no fault of his own. I reiterate that his recipe was delicious. I’m the one that made a mistake somewhere so the mousse didn’t set, except I can’t remember where I went wrong.  I still ended up with a great fig frozen mousse ice cream thing though. Yeah...

Anyway, so this is what it's supposed to look like: Yoroizuka's Mango Banana Mousse Cake.

And here's the recipe in Japanese.

If you can read or decipher French, here's the handwritten recipe.

The top layer is a mango mousse.  The middle one is a banana mousse with a hint of pineapple, filled with pineapple chunks.  The bottom is a coconut dacquoise, the first dacquoise I’ve ever made. Everything came out well.  You could really taste all the individual fruit flavors, and the texture of the coconut in the dacquoise just brought everything together.  Nothing was too sweet, and it was perfectly delicate in that Japanese-French way.  

I don't have hundreds of molds so mine ended up being circles instead of that fancy square layer thing Yoroizuka does.  One day.

I made the full recipe this time, which means I ended up with a lot of leftover mousse and cake. I made a mental note to only make a half recipe the next time. But as I found out with the fig mousse, I really only need to do a third or a fourth of his recipes. Now I just need to figure out which one of his 175+ recipes he has up online that I want to attempt...



Figs: Part Two ~ Fig Mousse Cake and Toshi Yoroizuka ~

This turned out to be one of the biggest disasters I’ve made in a long time. Tasted great, but the mousse DIDN’T SET! I went back and compared the recipe to other similar ones and it looks like I used enough gelatine but clearly not...I must have measured something incorrectly. After I froze and unmolded them, they slowly melted, like ice cream. Argh.

The recipe I attemped was from Toshi Yoroizuka, a famous pastry chef in Japan. He’s known as being the only Japanese person to have ever worked in a 3 star restaurant in Belgium. Whatever that really means. Regardless, his boutiques in Japan have hour long waits daily, and it’s pretty much impossible to get a seat inside the salon where he makes plated desserts in full view behind a counter. This was the second recipe of his that I attempted.

The plan was to make something that looked like this: http://grand-patissier.info/ToshiYoroizuka/recette/zoom141.htm

Granted I don’t have molds like his but below is how mine ended up. Unfortunately, with the melting going on, I only completed one of the cakes. I gave up on the other ones. I made them into tartlets instead. Fail.

In case you’re curious, the English translation of the recipe is below. Here’s the link to the original in Japanese: http://www.grand-patissier.info/ToshiYoroizuka/recette/recette141.htm

I halved everything since one thing I learned from that first recipe I attempted was that his recipes yield a LOT. I really should’ve just made a third of the recipe. I could probably even get away with making just a fourth since I only have eight molds of everything anyway, but first things first. I need to succeed at making the mousse set...bah.