Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and this ... is NOT an avocado!
It's actually a dessert shaped like an avocado in a chocolate shell made without using any
molds.
To make this let's start with an actual avocado and cut it open and then you can see an avocado
has 2 colours ... they have the green around the outside and this yellow on the inside.
So what we need to do is scrape out the yellow part very carefully, not going too deep because
everything next to the skin is a darker colour.
So you need to leave a slight border of yellow still in place so that you don't get any of
that dark colour and put all that yellow into one bowl.
Then scrape the rest into a different bowl.
And now that we are scraping down you can see how quite dark green it is there and if
you mix that in with the rest of it, the whole thing becomes green so that's why we are separating
them.
Scrape out as much as is possible to make the skin all clean and then put that to one
side, don't throw it out.
Grate the zest of one orange, make sure you get just the coloured part, not the white
because the white is very bitter.
And then we also want the zest of a lime.
Look at those colours, doesn't that look good?
So now we have the 2 bowls ... the dark and the light.
And the light works out at roughly half of the amount of the dark.
We are going to mix them with some milk, sugar, gelatin and the dark I'm going to mix in with
the lime and the light I'm going to mix with the orange rind.
So we'll have the 2 flavours in there.
And all these recipe quantities are on the howtocookthat.net website for you and I'll
link to that below.
The first thing you need to do is take some of your milk and add it in with the gelatin
and immediately stir that to make sure that you don't have any lumps and then we'll just
leave that for the gelatin to absorb the moisture from the milk.
Place the remaining milk into a blender with the sugar, the yellow coloured avocado and
the orange rind.
And you want to blend that until it is completely smooth.
If you don't have a blender you could use a food processor or you could push it through
a sieve several times and mash it all up but you will find it hard to get it perfectly
smooth if you don't have the blender.
Heat the gelatin in the microwave until that's melted and then add that into the mixture
and blend them together.
Now push the whole thing through a sieve just to get rid of any little bits of rind so we
don't have those orange specks all the way through our avocado cream.
Then set that to one side.
Repeat the exact same process with those same ingredients for the green part of the avocado.
Once you've done that then out of the green, take 120 grams, and put that into a separate
bowl and then to the original bowl add a tablespoon of lime juice and stir that through.
This is just to intensify that lime flavour.
Cover that one with a lid and set it to one side.
Now take the chocolate and melt it in the microwave and once it's completely melted,
stir in the smaller amount of your avocado cream.
Add in a little bit of orange food colouring at a time until you get a shade similar to
an avocado pip.
I was originally thinking of using a chocolate for the pip, like a Lindt ball or something
like that but in comparison to the real thing they're way too small.
So instead I'm going to use this avocado gnash... just pip some of that into a balloon.
Just for the bottom bit to be full and then tie a knot in that so you have a ball around
the size of your pip.
Place that into the freezer to let it firm up.
Now take the avocado skin and add in some tempered dark chocolate, just use the back
of your spoon to spread it up the sides so that everywhere is covered and there's no
gaps.
Then once that is set, you can simply peel off the avocado skin and now you have a chocolate
avocado skin.
I was really pleased when I experimented with this and it worked out because it's just really
simple but clever.
Next i want to make a crunchy nut praline to put under the avocado when we plate it
up.
This is really simple to make, you just chuck some sugar and water into a pan and once it
comes to a boil, rinse down the sides using a wet pastry brush.
Rinsing down the sides just gets off any sugar crystals that might be on the sides of the
pan ... if you leave them there it can make it crystalise and, instead of being nice,
clear, crisp caramel at the end.
Then you just leave that to boil.
Tip some slivered almonds or nuts of your choice onto a lined baking tray and then once
that sugar is just starting to go golden, take it off the heat and immediately pour
it over the nuts.
Now don't touch this ... it will be super, super hot!
It will burn you really badly, just leave it to cool.
Into each chocolate shell pipe some green avocado cream around the edge and the base.
Then pipe in yellow in the centre.
Smooth that off using your spatula, don't take too much time on this because you'll
have to do it again in a minute.
And then add in one of the chocolate cream centres.
Make sure it's right in the middle and just push it down slightly.
Then use your spatula again to make it look like it has just been cut in 2 and that the
moussey cream is right at the level at the top of your chocolate.
Run your finger around the edge to get off anything that is on the outside.
Now to add some variation to the pip colour, I'm just putting a tiny bit of dark chocolate
ganache and using some baking paper to spread it across the pip.
Break your cooled caramel up into small pieces and chunks, this stuff tastes amazing, you
could eat just this on it's own.
And put a spoonful of that onto the plate and then add your chocolate avocado dessert
on top.
That will really confuse your friends when you serve that up for dessert!
Subscribe to HowToCookThat for more crazy, sweet creations.
Click here for the No Mold Apple desert, Here for mini baking and here for GIANT chocolate
bars.
Make it a great week and I'll see you on Friday.