Coco Mango Lassi Entremet

Happy New Year valued readers! I hope you've all had a lovely holiday season with your loved ones. A new year usually means new resolutions to live healthier lives. Though I always try to balance my sweet toothed tendencies with a relatively active lifestyle, due to Jakarta's gridlocked traffic and being in the car for hours everyday this is not always easy. So when Rian from The Foodie Magazine asked me to come up with a guilt-free dessert, I jumped at the opportunity to do so. I thought it would be good for me to start to find ways to limit my use of sugar and flour and still make a visually appealing and tasty cake to satisfy my cravings.

I am pretty happy with the cake that I came up with. It's great to be able to use local mangoes and freshly grated coconut flesh in this cake for added nutritional value and fiber. To replace the sugar I used stevia, and used honey to lightly sweeten the mango mousse. My friends have commented that the resulting cake did not taste "healthy" at all, and that they couldn't believe that it was guilt-free. Well though the cake is certainly not "calorie-free" it is free of refined sugar and processed white flour. That alone for me, is a pretty cool achievement. So try this cake out for yourself at home, and let me know what you think!

x Tal

The Astrid

Hello my dearest kitchen dwellers, how are you all doing? I am writing this post filled with a lot of excitement, eager to show you all this latest cake of mine. I've been thinking a lot lately about how to construct a successful entremet. I've tasted some wonderful layered cakes in the past, but have also tasted ones that did not live up to their colorful promise. There are many factors that need to be weighed when deciding on components for an entremet. Structure, texture, balance and aesthetic all need to be considered individually, as well as how they would taste together in a bite. Each layer needs to have a function and needs to contribute to the overall taste and texture of the cake as a whole. For me, it was a fun challenge trying to balance pistachio, white chocolate and raspberry so that no flavor would overpower the other. I wanted the fragrance of pistachio, the acidity of the raspberry and the sweet, roundness of the white chocolate to work together in a nice tasty symphony.

The cake that I came up with is by no means perfect, but I am very proud of it. This cake was tasted by 15 foodie friends and most of them thought that the balance was right and that the flavors work well together. They found also that the pop-rocks in the "pistachio crunch" as a nice wee surprise and adds playful texture to the cake. I topped the cake with some freeze-dried raspberries and pistachio sand to add a burst of color and flavor while still keeping the decor simple and minimalistic.

The layers are as follows:

White chocolate brownie

Pistachio sand, pop-rock crunch

Raspberry cream

Raspberry jelly

Pistachio dacquoise

Vanilla Creme Brulee

White chocolate cream

White chocolate glaze

Pistachio sand and freeze-dried raspberries

Bon Appetit!

Feel free to talk to me or let me know what you think on twitter or instagram @TalitaSetyadi

x Tal

ps. sorry I've decided to keep the recipe secret for this one ;)