Airy, creamy chocolate mousse, fluffy soft sponge cake, fruity sweet strawberry jam and aromatic roasted hazelnuts are combined in the Russian mini cake "Eva". It was not without reason that people in the Soviet era were willing to wait in line at pastry shops, no matter how long, to get their hands on this heavenly delicious but very rare dessert. According to this recipe, you can easily make the mini chocolate mousse cake yourself at home.
Course Dessert
Cuisine Russian, Soviet
Prep Time 50 minutesminutes
Cook Time 25 minutesminutes
Cooling time 2 hourshours
Servings 10pieces
Ingredients
for the dough
5eggs
100gsugar
125gflour
8gvanilla sugar
for the chocolate mousse
250gdark chocolate
175gcream
380mlmilk
2eggs
130gsugar
20gbutter
20gcornstarch
8gvanilla sugar
for the filling
100gstrawberry jam(pureed)
for the rolling
approx. 200ghazelnuts(roasted and finely chopped)
Instructions
Making the dough
Beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla sugar to a fluffy white mixture.
Fold in flour to make an airy, thick batter.
Spread the dough evenly on a baking tray lined with baking paper, bake the sponge in a preheated oven at 180 °C top and bottom heat for about 10 minutes and let it cool.
Making the chocolate mousse
Whisk eggs and cornstarch in a thick-bottomed saucepan until all lumps have dissolved.
Add milk and sugar to another thick-bottomed saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring briefly so that the sugar dissolves before boiling.
Add the hot milk with sugar in a thin stream to the egg-starch mixture, stirring constantly, place the mixture on the stove and cook, stirring constantly, until thickened (about the consistency of pudding), about 2 - 3 minutes.
Take the pudding mixture off the heat, immediately add butter and vanilla sugar, stir it until the butter is melted, and then let it cool, stirring occasionally.
Melt dark chocolate and let it cool as well as it can.
Whip cream until creamy.
In batches, add the pudding mixture to the cream, whipping it each time to a homogeneous cream.
Add the melted dark chocolate to the cream in a thin stream and continue to whip until it forms a homogeneous mousse. Then chill the chocolate mousse for about 20 minutes.
Making the mini cakes
Using a round cookie cutter or a drinking glass, cut out circles from the sponge cake (in my case, each circle is Ø 7.5 cm).
Spread half of the sponge cake circles generously with half of the chocolate mousse, put about 1 teaspoon of strawberry jam on each circle and place one sponge cake circle without chocolate mousse on top, so that you get sandwich cookies filled with chocolate mousse and jam. Now spread the remaining chocolate mousse on the top sponge cake circles in a dome shape.
Roll the dome-shaped mini cakes in hazelnuts and press the nuts a little with your hands. Refrigerate the mini chocolate mousse cakes for about 2 hours.
Notes
The amount of sugar for the chocolate mousse can be adjusted to taste.
Instead of strawberry jam, you can use another jam for the filling that matches the taste of the chocolate mousse.
Instead of hazelnuts, you can also use other nuts.
Note the detailed tips and tricks for making the mini chocolate mousse cake "Eva" above in the post.