A romantic Valentine's Day dessert - chocolate mousse in a chocolate cup with a biscuit spoon

My boyfriend and I decided to stay home for Valentine's Day for the first time this year (which isn't as extravagant as it sounds, this is only our third Valentine's Day together!). I knew immediately that I wanted to try to recreate an amazing dessert we had at a hotel in Amsterdam, so I give you....

A chocolate cup, filled with chocolate mousse, sprinkled with candy hearts, accompanied by a biscuit spoon. All homemade, apart from the candy hearts. For our main course, we had beef Wellington (or possibly horse Wellington, who knows these days?). 

I started by making the biscuits the night before, using a recipe I adapted from Jen at Blue Kitchen Bakes.

I halved the recipe and made five spoons; for that you need:

50g caster sugar, or ideally a packet of Dr Oetker vanilla sugar (though I bought this in Germany) with the rest of the weight made up with caster sugar. Though according to Jen, it's easy enough to make your own vanilla sugar by infusing a vanilla pod in a pot of caster sugar for a couple of weeks.

50g butter

100g self-raising flour

A silicon spoon mould from Lakeland comes in quite handy too!

Mix the sugar and vanilla sugar if you are using it

Add the butter and cream together

Mix in the flour to make a dough

Here's my Lakeland mould - it was only a couple of pounds in their sale.

I pressed the mixture into the mould, which wasn't that easy - this mould would probably be better for something you could pour, like chocolate or candy melts, or even cake mixture. But I got there in the end...

Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes until the biscuits are turning golden. Unfortunately they spread quite a lot over the sides of the moulds...

 

Here it is the other way up - it came out of the mould in one piece.

 

However, using a small, sharp knife I was able to cut between the spoons and trim off the excess, leaving me with five cute little biscuit spoons.

 

 Now for my next trick... to make the chocolate cups to contain the mousse. I also bought a set of six silicon moulds recently - I wasn't entirely sure what else I could use them for but had this recipe in mind.

Melt some chocolate - about 50g should be enough

Using a silicon pastry brush, brush the melted chocolate around the inside of the mould. You need to make sure there aren't any gaps.

Leave to set in the fridge. I left these overnight, but they seemed to set within an hour or so. Now for the tricky part - carefully peel off the silicon mould (I found I could roll it down), leaving you with a chocolate cup. I was actually quite surprised this worked, and admittedly only one of them came out this well -the other one broke up quite a bit!

I made chocolate mousse from this recipe I have already blogged. I made the whole quantity as milk chocolate mousse rather than doing half white chocolate, and left out the pomegranate seeds. This is up there with the nicest chocolate mousse I've ever had, and is now my go-to recipe whenever I want to make it. I left this overnight in the fridge but again it did seem to have set within a couple of hours.

 

Fill your chocolate cup with mousse

As it was Valentine's Day, I sprinkled some candy hearts on the top

Serve with the biscuit spoon. This worked incredibly well and we managed to eat about half the mousse before eating the spoons! Luckily I had made spare spoons :-)
My boyfriend was very impressed with this dessert and I was very happy with it too.

I am sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Kate at What Kate Baked and Karen at Lavender and Lovage, as their theme is perfect puddings - and this is to me the perfect pudding!

I am also sending this to Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel at DollyBakes and Laura at Laura Loves Cakes, as their theme is Valentine's Day.