A very grown up chai chocolate mousse

This chocolate mousse is decadent and beautifully soft and the flavours are strong and intense, but don’t worry if chai isn’t really your thing, there are options throughout to make the recipe a little more palatable to those with more delicate tastes

So, the very first part of this dessert is to make the incredibly intense and spicy chai simple syrup. It is not labour intensive, but it does require a lot of ingredients — hopefully, they’re the sort of thing you have lying in the back of the cupboards!

Throw all of the spices into a large pan along with the sugar, orange zest, rose water, vanilla and three cups of filtered water.

Boil everything on a high heat for 15 minutes, then turn the heat off and allow the spices to sit and infuse in the cooling syrup for at least an hour — longer if you like stronger flavours.

Once cooled you can pour the syrup into a bottle and store it in the fridge for future Starbucks chai latte replica making, if that’s your thing.

Or you can add it to coffee or hot chocolates or even whisky, if that’s your tipple but right now, I am using it to make this very dark and very adult chocolate mousse.

So, with that being said, to the mousse!

Drain a can of faithful chickpeas and put the liquid, which is called aquafaba, in a pan.

Heat the liquid and allow some of the water to boil away — you should be left with around 250ml after 10 minutes or so.

Whisk the remaining liquid in a very clean and dry, grease-free bowl, adding a tsp of acid to help stabilise it — I used malt vinegar. You should get stiff peaks before too long and at this point you can add sugar if your palate requires a little more sweetness.

I would recommend adding a quarter cup of sugar at this point in teaspoon increments, whisking constantly to ensure the stability of the aquafaba isn’t lost.

By the end of the whisking process you should be able to hold the bowl upside down without losing any of the contents — exactly like egg whites.

So, now that you have your base, you can melt 100g vegan chocolate. I used 74% but again, if you prefer something sweeter you can use a vegan “milk” chocolate instead.

When the chocolate is melted and slightly cooled add one or two tablespoons of the chai mix into the chocolate and incorporate that into the aquafaba.

Mix the chocolate thoroughly, making sure that there are no non-chocolate blobs left. Taste! If this is good for you, great, if not add a little more chai.

I happen to like spicy and complicated desserts, so I ended up adding 4 tablespoons of the chai syrup to mine.

Now that the mixture is to your liking, decant it into any pretty glasses you have and allow them to set in the fridge for at least an hour.

Once they are chilled you can serve with some spun sugar — and glitter — on top!

Ingredients

Aquafaba (one tin of chickpea water) ∙ 100g minimum 70% vegan chocolate ∙ quarter cup sugar or half and half sweetener/sugar ∙ 10 star anise ∙ 1 tbsp fresh ginger ∙ 1 tsp ground ginger ∙ one tsp ground cinnamon ∙ half tsp peppercorns ∙ half a nutmeg chopped roughly ∙ 15 green cardamom pods ∙ 1 tsp coriander seeds ∙ half tsp fennel seeds ∙ 15 cloves ∙ pinch of saffron (optional) ∙ half tbsp rose water ∙ half tbsp vanilla extract ∙ zest of one orange ∙ sugar ∙ water

Nutrition

Recipe makes two large or four small pots — nutrition is based on two servings

• Calories: 315
• Carbohydrates: 24g
• Fiber: 0g
• Sodium: 0g
• Protein: 5g
• Sugar: 21.5g
• Fat: 20.5g