"Quite frankly...

.... that was a totally amazing dessert!" said Harriet a good 20 times (she was a little bit tipsy but I'm sure she was sincere; she stood by her statement(s) the following day as I passed her the leftovers :) For my dinner party last Sunday I wanted to use an idea that I first saw on "Come Dine With Me Down Under" (the Aussie equivalent show of "Come Dine With Me" U.K).
Ages ago my sister bought me some silicon cupcake cases, and if I'm honest they haven't been used until now, but I've been waiting to put them to good use...

... as chocolate "moulds"! So, over a pan of hot water I melted a bowl of white chocolate and when it was runny enough I poured it into the silicon cases, swirling the chocolate around and emptying out the excess that fell to the bottom of the case by pouring it out again. Then they got got put straight into the freezer in a flat position. After a short while they had set and the silicon cases could be carefully peeled away and the edible chocolate cups could then be stored in the fridge...

In the background you can see the huge bowl of blackberries that I have picked 

from directly behind my garden. I got all these on the same day too...

The day I picked them I saw a punnet 1/4 of the size on sale in Sainsburys for £4. Get picking NOW!

Which leads me onto the filling for the white chocolate cups... "Creamy Blackberry Mousse".
Blackberries and white chocolate go so well together!
I followed the recipe that I googled and found on the Daily Mail website...
Here's the link...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1200956/Recipe-Easy-blackberry-mousse.html

There was quite a lot of leftover mousse; to make 6 chocolate cups of mousse next time I will do as follows...

Easy Blackberry Mousse for 5/6 Small portions

Place 200g of blackberries in a blender with 50g of icing sugar and a small squeeze of lemon juice.

Whizz to a puree

Pass through a fine mesh sieve into a large bowl.

Stir in 200ml of double cream and whip into a fluffy mousse.

Transfer the mousse into the chocolate cups and decorate with some whole blackberries.

(A mint leaf would look nice to compliment the colour too).

.....................................

Then I repeated the process but made dark chocolate cups and this time filled them with 

"Irish Cream Mousse". Confession time... I bought a "mousse base" from M+S that just had to be mixed with cream... I'm not sure if it was a top-seller as the fact it was 10p suggests it might not be, but it certainly tasted nice...! I might be googling "Irish Cream mousse" next time if I repeat this mousse combo though...

And finally, I made some solid chocolate hearts to serve with the mousses by poring the remaining chocolate into my heart-shaped ice-cube tray from IKEA...

 And here they are, with a drizzle of toffee and chocolate sauce and a few chocolate curls that I made by pulling my "serrated edge peeler" along the smallest edge of a bar of dark chocolate. Yep, they really do make serrated edge peelers - I was kind of struggling to pick something the last time I got passed the Pampered chef catalogue by one of my reading volunteers in work! 

I'll admit, I was a little bit drunk at this point in the dinner party and my photo, taken in rubbish lighting, doesn't really do it justice but you get the idea...

I was pretty happy with the presentation though, and the fact all my dinner party guests started photographing their pudding was more than complimentary enough!

J :)