It’s probably not in the category of puddings that should be served up at a really smart dinner party, but as something for a bit of a pudding treat at home it definitely fills a gap.  Be warned though – your first mouthful won’t taste anything like you expect!

I tend to keep blocks of stewed fruit in our freezer.  When we’re having a fruit glut in the late summer I tend to stew it up and freeze it in half-full small foil containers that you get Chinese take-away in (you can usually buy new ones at the supermarket as well).  When I created this I used two defrosted blocks of fruit – if you do something similar then it can save you the first half hour or preparation and stewing time (and the cooling time).

Paleo fruit tart

Ingredients (serves 4-6):
2-3 pears, peeled and chopped
6 plums, stoned and chopped
200g Greek yoghurt
2 tsp honey (provided plums and pears were reasonably ripe)
4 large eggs

Directions:

1. Place the pears into a pan that has a lid with a couple of tablespoons of water and cover.  Heat until the fruit is simmering and then turn the heat down low and continue to simmer, covered, for 10 minutes.
2. Add the plums to the simmering pear, replace the lid and continue to simmer for a further 10-20 minutes until the plum is well stewed but not burned.  Plums burn easily when stewing so be sure to keep the heat very low and stir the fruit around regularly.  The final mix should have the pear over-stewed so that it turns into pear-puree and the plum still has soft chunks in it.
3. Set the fruit mix aside for a while to cool.
4. Preheat the oven to 180C.
5. Grease and line a 6 inch loose-bottomed (or spring-sided) cake tin.
6. Beat the eggs in a bowl and then whisk the eggs together with the yoghurt.
7. Add the fruit to the yoghurt and egg mix and mix thoroughly.
8. Pour the mix into the cake tin and place in the oven for 45-55 minutes until the top is golden brown and the tart has set.
9. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin.  Ideally you want to put the cooled tart into the fridge for a few hours while still in the tin to get it to set properly (the one in the picture came out of the tin while still warm and some liquid seeped out of it as a result.
10. Once cold, slide a knife round the edges to loosen and then remove the tart and serve chilled.

I’m working on some ways to neaten this out and make it a bit smarter, but since I only make new recipes as fast as we need them at home you may be waiting until next summer for the updated version of this!

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: fruit crunch
2. Paleo recipes: onion tart
3. Paleo recipes: blackberry and apple cheesecake toppings

As an example, I might spend weeks working on a new exercise in the gym because it’s good for some part of your range of motion and all of a sudden I’ll try the move I’m trying to assist and realise that it’s working and I haven’t wasted my time.  Or I’ll be working on face pulls and suddenly I’ll get my shoulders and back muscles into the right place and everything suddenly works.

This is, unfortunately, not a cheery post about such a great moment.  Instead I had a crisis of confidence about my diet in June.  A sort of reverse aha moment.

Why do I have to deny myself cream cakes?

My reverse aha moment

I’d been a bit off-diet for a couple of weeks due to the holiday and general lack of willpower.  Working late and driving all over the country I was starting to struggle to resist coming home via the shops and picking up a trifle, or a cream bun, or (when I could persuade myself to be a bit better) some hot ready-cooked chicken, or prawn cocktail.  However, the cream buns were cheaper, so they featured more.

On one of these occasions I pulled into the car park, turned off the car engine and thought long and hard.  I watched a few people coming out of the supermarket.  One was eating an ice-cream.  Another was carrying a few paper bags of doughnuts.  Yet another person came out with a big box of beer and a pile of ready-to-bake pizzas – presumably getting ready for a night in front of the football.

It suddenly struck me – why was I doing this to myself?  Why was I denying myself what I wanted and suffering from guilt-pangs when I did get a “treat”? 

Yes, my figure is better than it was, but before I started down this path my figure was more petite (if less lean) and I didn’t care about how I looked.  These days I’m endlessly worrying about my figure. 

Yes, I’m ill less often but how sick was I before?  Maybe a couple of times each year.

Here were all these other people eating what they want, when they want.  They may worry about their body fat, but probably not obsessively.  I was crazy to try to be any different.

It even started to affect my training.  I suddenly couldn’t understand why I was putting myself through all this pain in the gym each week.  I went into workouts in a demotivated state.  I just couldn’t find any fun in it anymore.

Pulling out of the rut

After a couple of weeks of this I got ill.  Unlike my bout of flu in January when I was better within a couple of days, this time I felt exhausted, demotivated and miserable and it took me a week to get back on my feet.

Being ill gave me time to think.

I hadn’t taken my Vitamin D for a couple of weeks, due to holidays and forgetfulness.  That could be a cause for getting ill in such superb style.  But I started to think that poor diet was also instrumental in my slow recovery.

Then I had a read through my own blog.  The articles about diet.  The articles about why I do what I do.  Articles about motivation, bone density, long lasting health.  It was like being hit over the head with a mallet.  Repeatedly. 

Why do I diet?  Why do I deny myself the things I crave?  Why do I sometimes struggle but not give in?

Because I care about myself and I care about being able to do the things I want to do with my life.

Am I back on track?

I’m definitely getting there.  A benefit of being ill was that my appetite reduced and I didn’t leave the house.  That was enough to break the addictive habit so that I no longer craved the wrong foods.  There really is something in the “addictive carbs” argument.

I’ve not been off-diet since I was ill and I’ve taken some time to think about what really caused this crisis of confidence.  My biggest problems revolve around the availability of paleo snacks and the cost of food in the UK.  It’s easy to “treat” yourself to something that is completely outside the realm of the paleo diet when you go into a shop, but unless you have plenty of spare cash or a stove in the back of the car it’s almost impossible to treat yourself to a snack that is paleo.  A definite problem since the easiest solution is pure willpower.

Yes, I definitely think I’m back on track.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you wonder why you’re doing something like this, whether diet or training-related?

Related posts:

1. Transitioning to the Paleo diet
2. Diet to gain muscle as a woman
3. Impact of diet on the menstrual cycle

I actually tried making this in several different ways.  The recipe below is the one that won the taste test, but I’ve included comments at the bottom of the other variations that I tried.

Blackberry frozen yoghurt

Ingredients:
1kg plain yoghurt, I use a cheap low-fat one that I’ve found and which is quite tasty, but most recipes recommend a good quality full-fat or Greek variety
400g blackberries
6 tsp vanilla essence

Directions:

1. Press the blackberries through a sieve to remove the small seeds and create a blackberry coulis.  You may find it easier to zap the blackberries in a blender first to create a pippy-paste before you start.
2. Add the vanilla and yoghurt and mix together thoroughly.
3. Pour the yoghurt mix into a Tupperware box and place into the freezer.
4. Every 30-45 minutes (this will depend a little on how much patience you have and how cold your freezer is) take the box out of the freezer and beat the yoghurt mix thoroughly with a fork to remove the ice crystals.  You may find it easier to turn the mix out into a blender and pulse it briefly, or use a hand blender, rather than using a fork.  My personal preference is to use a hand blender as I find the fork still leaves the ice crystals a bit too much intact and the result is a watery-flavoured frozen yoghurt.
5. Continue this process until the yoghurt is frozen solid but with a smooth consistency.  The closer it gets to being fully frozen, the more frequently you will want to take it out of the freezer to beat it.

Despite all this regular blending (or perhaps because I was lazy and stopped blending it before it was completely frozen) I found that it was far too solid a lump when I came to serve it.  So solve this I turned it out into a bowl, cut it into a smaller pieces (for the sake of my blender’s motor) and blizted it into a smooth consistency again.  If anyone knows the solution to stop it freezing quite so solid then please let me know!

The flavours that lost:

The first of the two alternatives were made with nothing added to the yoghurt and blackberries.  This was great but suffered a little from the sharpness of the plain yoghurt which overpowered the blackberries a little.  Using the vanilla essence tempers the sharpness enough to allow the blackberry flavour to become more prominent.

The second alternative is done by adding 1.5 tbsp honey instead of vanilla essence to the mix.  We were disappointed by the results, perhaps because we rarely use honey now and have lost our taste for particularly sweet foods.  All we could taste was honey.  It may be that 1.5 tbsp is too much (it was certainly difficult to mix in) and this option may appeal to those of you with more of a taste for sweet foods, but we decided that the vanilla essence one was much nicer and it would be better for us to have no honey in it anyway.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: blackberry and apple cheesecake toppings
2. Paleo recipes: banana bread
3. Paleo recipes: custard

As a general rule I always keep blocks of stewed fruit in the freezer.  I buy up bags of fruit, such as pears and apples, when they are reduced in the supermarket and receive bagfuls of plums and apples in the summer from friends and family who have fruit trees, chop and stew them, freeze them in small containers and then turn these fruit blocks out into bags (so that I can reuse the containers to freeze more).  We also spend the autumn picking enormous quantities of blackberries and freezing these in bags. 

If you also keep pre-stewed fruit or berries then I suggest turning out your preferred quantity of these into an oven dish and put them in the oven for about 30 minutes at 175C to defrost, warm up and further stew a little.

Fruit crunch

Ingredients:
Fresh fruit
Nuts and seeds
Yoghurt and/or crème fraiche for serving

Fruit choices and quantities:

I find apples, pears, plums, rhubarb and blackberries work best for stewing.  If you are using any fruits that may be sharp, such as rhubarb or some plum varieties, then I recommend mixing these with sweet dessert apples or pears so that no sugar is needed.  If, on tasting the stewed fruit, you find it a bit too sharp, this can be improved by either a teaspoon or two of honey per serving stirred into the fruit or, my personal preference, serving the fruit with a spoonful of plain yoghurt which, strangely, can take the sharpest edge off the fruit.

I usually allow the equivalent of two apples, three handfuls of berries or two sticks of rhubarb per person.  For example, if I was going for a plum and pear mix for two people, I might use three pears (which, because they are often quite small, is usually equivalent to two apples) and eight small plums.  For an apple and blackberry mix for two I would use three apples and a very large handful of blackberries (or two smaller handfuls).

Quantities are very much a case of judging with the eye.  When in doubt cook extra.  If there is stewed fruit left over then it can always be frozen in blocks and defrosted at a later date.

Nut and seed choices and quantities:

My choice of nuts and seeds will depend on who is eating it.  If I’m doing this for myself as an impromptu treat then I’ll use cashew nuts (because we keep a pot of them in the kitchen) and sunflower seeds.  If my brother-in-law was visiting I would just use sunflower seeds, since he is allergic to nuts.  If I was serving this to friends I would probably buy a bag of mixed nuts for a variety of flavours.

I usually allow a large handful of nuts and seeds mixed together per serving.  If you want to serve this up with the nuts and seeds already covering the dish then it may depend a little on your dish size.  If in doubt, put your prepared nuts and seeds into the dish before you start the cooking and check they give an even covering across the bottom (and will therefore provide an even covering over all the stewed fruit once you are ready to serve).

Directions:

1. Peel, core and finely chop the fruit as necessary.  I always peel apples and pears, but never plums.  If the skin of the rhubarb is tough I peel it off.  I chop all the fruit finely except for plums which I tend to leave in slightly larger pieces because it reminds me of the plum crumble they used to serve in the kitchens at school decades ago.
2. Place the fruit into a saucepan with about half a cup of water (to stop the fruit from burning and to assist the stewing process).
3. Put a lid on the pan and place over a high heat.  The quantity of fruit and the size of the pan will affect how long it takes.  I would leave it untouched for about 5 mins and then take a look at the fruit and stir it about.  If there isn’t much water in the pan anymore, add a little more.  If the fruit feels soft then you are probably there, if it is still very firm then you’ll need to give it longer.  Be aware that plums and rhubarb, with their more robust fibres, are more forgiving than apples and pears which can turn to a mushy purree if they are stewed for too long.
4. Once the fruit is sufficiently stewed either transfer it to an oven dish and place in a warm oven to keep hot until serving, or serve directly to bowls (if you want it to be a “do it yourself” pudding).
5. While the fruit is stewing, break the nuts into smallish pieces using a pestle and mortar or by placing them in a bag and hitting them with a rolling pin (or book, or anything fairly heavy that will break them into smaller pieces).
6. Spread the “chopped” nuts and seeds on a baking tray and bake at 175C until light brown and roasted – this usually takes about 5 mins.  While they roast mix and shake them every couple of minutes to ensure they are evenly browned and to be sure they don’t burn.  Nuts with a higher fat content have a tendency to burn quickly unless you keep turning them.

Serving:

There are a few different ways to serve this and which you choose is most likely to depend on who you are serving it to.

My preference is to serve up the stewed fruit on its own and have small dishes in the centre of the table with the roasted nut and seed mix and with yoghurt or crème fraiche for people to help themselves to as much or as little as they want.

Alternatively, if you want a more complete pudding, I recommend spreading the roasted nuts and seeds quite thickly (about half a centimetre) over the stewed fruit so that it already has the crusty topping when you serve it up.

A flexible pudding in every way!

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: fruit tart
2. Paleo recipes: sausage casserole
3. Paleo recipes: roast duck with apple

As a warning for those in the UK, these are like Scotch pancakes rather than crepes or traditional pancakes.

We had them plain, but we felt that they had really needed something on them.  Either a bit of butter if they were for a tea-time treat or a dash of cream and a few berries if they were for pudding.

Almond banana pancakes

Ingredients: (makes 8-10 pancakes)
2 bananas
1 egg
1 heaped tablespoon almond butter

Directions:

1. Mash the bananas in a bowl.
2. Add the egg and almond butter and mix well.  I used a hand blender for this to be sure the ingredients were properly combined and to get a bit of air into it.  You should find it has the consistency of a thick pancake batter.
3. Put a little oil into a bowl and, using a piece of kitchen paper, wipe some round a pan.
4. Heat the pan over a gentle heat until it is warm.  Note that, unlike crepes, you don’t want the pan to be smoking hot, instead these need cooking slowly over a low heat.
5. Using a tablespoon or ladle, pour batter for three or four pancakes into the pan – you want to create a patty about the size of the palm of your hand.
6. Leave these on the low heat for 2-3 minutes until they are light brown on the underside.
7. Carefully turn them over and cook for a further few minutes on the other side until they are lightly browned on both sides.  Beware that if you try to turn them too soon the batter on the topside may be loose and you may not end up with the “perfect pancake”.
8. Once the pancakes are lightly browned on both sides serve them up with your preferred topping.
9. Wipe the pan round using the kitchen paper dipped in oil and return to step 5 to make another batch!

I’ll be working on this recipe over the next few months to develop a pancake with less banana and, if possible, no almond butter.  Almond butter is difficult to get hold of in the UK unless you live near a big town with a health-food store and is incredibly expensive.  Also, my brother-in-law is allergic to nuts and it would be good to have a tea-time treat he can eat when they next visit.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: banana bread
2. Paleo recipes: cheesecake base
3. Paleo recipes: almond milk

Since I was making up the recipe, I tried two different recipes for the base and two different recipes for the topping.  Last week I compared the recipes for the bases.  This week I’m going to compare the two toppings.

I had blackberries and stewed apple in the freezer and hoped that these fruits would provide a natural sweetness to the topping.  Unfortunately the apples were cheap and were quite green, so they weren’t as sweet as I might have hoped.

In neither case is the topping completely dairy-free, so if you follow a dairy-free paleo diet then this won’t be ideal.  But then, if you make cheesecake without any dairy it’s not really going to be cheesecake anymore!  I used quark which is made by leaching the whey out of yoghurt.  As such I think it is better for you than cream cheese since I believe that, even in our prehistoric days, we would have consumed fermented dairy by eating the contents of the stomach of young animals, much like hyenas do.

Almost dairy-free baked cheesecake topping

Baked cheesecake - some sort of over-topping is needed for smart presentation

Ingredients:
2 apples
250g quark
150g blackberries
2 eggs

Directions:

1. Peel and core the apples.  Chop the apples in small pieces and place in a pan with a lid.  Add a splash of water, put the lid on the pan and place over a low heat for 10-15 minutes until the apples have disintegrated into a soft pulp, stirring frequently to ensure that the apples don’t burn on the bottom of the pan.
2. Put the apple puree into a sieve and press through the sieve into a bowl to create a smooth apple paste.  Leave to one side until cool.
3. Preheat the oven to 160C.
4. Put the quark in a separate bowl and beat it vigorously with a fork until it is a smooth paste. 
5. Once the apple paste is cool add this, half the blackberries and the eggs to the quark and beat vigorously until the mix is coloured by the blackberries (which will be crushed in the process).
6. Add the remaining blackberries and mix with a little more care to allow some blackberries to remain whole (or almost whole) within the mix.
7. Pour the mix over the cheesecake biscuit base and place in the oven.
8. Bake the cheesecake for approximately 50 minutes.  The topping should be lightly browned and firm if you press it with your finger but it will still give the impression of wobbling slightly if you shake the tin.
9. Leave the cheesecake to cool before turning out.  Following my experience with the base you may want to place the cooled cheesecake in the fridge in the tin and leave it for several hours until it is well-chilled before you turn it out.

This cheesecake topping was very bland.  It was difficult to believe that both toppings had been made with the same fruit since the other topping was much sweeter.  A couple of drops of stevia may have sorted the issue out, as would using sweeter dessert apples.  I have tried adding honey to the mix, but the resultant topping didn’t work at all.  I don’t recommend it. 

Despite this blandness, I found that I preferred this topping.  It had a good cheesecake consistency and complimented the base well.

The major downside with the topping was that baking it made it a bit less presentable – baking makes the topping crack.  My suggestion to fixing this would be to decorate the cheesecake as follows:

1. Thinly slice an apple.
2. Lightly grease a pan (or melt a little butter in the pan) and gently fry the apple slices over a low heat until they are soft and slightly brown.
3. Decorate the cheesecake with the caramelised apple slices and a few blackberries.

This additional topping would also address any problems of blandness.

No-bake cheesecake topping

No-bake cheesecake - very presentable, but also full of cream

Ingredients:
2 apples
250g quark
150g blackberries
200ml double cream

Directions:

1. Peel and core the apples.  Chop the apples in small pieces and place in a pan with a lid.  Add a splash of water, put the lid on the pan and place over a low heat for 10-15 minutes until the apples have disintegrated into a soft pulp, stirring frequently to ensure that the apples don’t burn on the bottom of the pan.
2. Put the apple puree into a sieve and press through the sieve into a bowl to create a smooth apple paste.  Leave to one side until cool.
3. Put the quark in a separate bowl and beat it vigorously with a fork until it is a smooth paste. 
4. Once the apple paste is cool add this and half the blackberries to the quark and beat vigorously until the mix is coloured by the blackberries (which will be crushed in the process).
5. In another bowl whip the cream until it forms firm peaks.
6. Mix together the quark and whipped cream.
7. Add the remaining blackberries and mix with a little more care to allow some blackberries to remain whole (or almost whole) within the mix.
8. Cover the cheesecake biscuit base with the topping, taking care to ensure that the topping is pushed into the corners.  You will almost certainly find you have too much topping, in which case this makes a good little pudding on its own in small ramekin dishes.
9. Place the cheesecake into the fridge and chill for 24 hours before removing from the tin and serving.

This topping works really well and I can’t fault it, but be warned that it is incredibly creamy.  If you dislike dairy or struggle to eat a lot of cream then you may find this is a bit too much.  It tastes more like a cream pudding than a cheesecake (and as such does work very well without the base as a stand-alone pudding) so if you are after something that it firmly traditional cheesecake you may prefer to go down the baked cheesecake route.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: cheesecake base
2. Paleo recipes: blackberry frozen yoghurt
3. Paleo recipes: roast duck with apple

Since I was making up the recipe, I tried two different recipes for the base and two different recipes for the topping.  This week, I will compare the recipes for the bases.  Next week I’ll compare the two toppings. 

Dairy-free cheesecake base

Dairy-free cheesecake base

Ingredients:
100g almond meal
200g almond butter
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp honey

Directions:

1. Place the ingredients into a bowl and mix together thoroughly.
2. Grease the sides of a cake tin with a 6 inch diameter and line the bottom with a piece of greaseproof paper.  If at all possible, use a tin with a loose bottom or a spring-sided tin to make it easier to turn out the cheesecake.
3. Press the mix tightly into the cake tin and set aside for the topping.

This cheesecake base holds together very well but tastes very strongly of almonds.  I found the almond flavour too overpowering for the cheesecake topping we used but Chris really liked the base. 

It’s very much personal preference but I would recommend using this base for cheesecakes where the topping is either very plain (so that the almond base becomes the feature flavour) or where the topping flavour is very strong and will be complimented by the nutty base.

Traditional cheesecake base

Traditional cheesecake base (we turned it out too soon, so it collapsed)

Ingredients:
3 oz butter
100g almond meal
2 tsp honey

Directions:

1. Melt the butter in a small pan over a low heat.
2. Pour the melted butter over the almond meal, add the honey and mix together thoroughly.
3. Grease the sides of a cake tin with a 6 inch diameter and line the bottom with a piece of greaseproof paper.  If at all possible, use a tin with a loose bottom or a spring-sided tin to make it easier to turn out the cheesecake.
4. Press the mix tightly into the cake tin and set aside for the topping.

This cheesecake base is much more traditional and, unlike the dairy-free base, doesn’t have any particularly strong flavour making it perfect for cheesecakes with more delicate flavours.  It was certainly my preferred base.

We used this base for the baked cheesecake and made the error of turning it out too soon (it didn’t help that the tin didn’t have a loose bottom).  The base needs to be refrigerated for several hours before turning it out to stop it from crumbling.  Once we had kept it in the fridge for a day or two we found that it was holding together well on each individual slice.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: blackberry and apple cheesecake toppings
2. Paleo recipes: almond banana pancakes
3. Paleo recipes: onion tart

Recipe one – Frozen Primal Custard from Mark’s Daily Apple

Paleo egg custard

Not a bad litle recipe.  It was reasonably quick to make up though measuring out that quantity of honey took an age and then the almond milk took longer than expected to bring to a simmer. 

While honey is theoretically paleo, eating it in such quantities or too often doesn’t seem right.  After all, honey and other sweet things (eg. fruit) would have been seasonal or one-off events, and honey is still essentially a sugar. 

The recipe calls for the custard to be baked for about 40 mins at 170C/325F so I left it on the timer and did something else while it cooked.  At the end of the time the water in the baking tray still came up to the top of the custard but the top half of each pot of custard had turned to a cake consistency (the bottom half remained as it should have been – a smooth and creamy custard).  The surface of a couple of them had burnt a bit too so either the oven was too hot or the cooking time was too long.  I would suggest reducing the cooking time a bit, or at least checking on it after the first 30 mins, and perhaps reducing the oven temperature to 160C too.

Thanks to getting 6 small pots of custard from the batch we tried eating it all three ways (hot out of the oven, cooled for a few hours in the fridge, frozen for more hours (overnight actually) in the freezer.  How you choose to have it depends on what you want to eat it for, but my favourite has to be chilled (but unfrozen).

With the effort for measuring out the ingredients, the cost of the honey and the quantity of honey I probably wouldn’t put this recipe at the top of my list of regular puddings.

Recipe two – Caveman Custard from the Son of Grok

Caveman custard

The bananas in this recipe are for the sweetness.  Having tried it with two bananas I would probably drop this down to one banana.  I’ve not got such a sweet tooth and it came out tasting strongly of bananas rather than egg custard.  In addition to cutting down the bananas I would also recommend adding a teaspoon of vanilla to the mix.

For simplicity, this recipe definitely outdoes Mark Sisson’s almond milk recipe.  Preparation is minimal and quick.  However, what you get out at the other end is further away from traditional egg custard and more like a banana souffle.

The recipe calls for you to put them straight into the oven, whereas all other egg custard recipes I’ve come across get baked while stood in a tray of water.  We tried both methods.  The one baked without surrounding water swelled up like a souffle, came out slightly grey in colour and had a definite bready souffle texture.  The one baked while standing in a tray of water didn’t rise and came out with a creamier texture – much closer to traditional egg custard, though still not quite there.

Baked without surrounding water

And the winner is…

For a quick pudding, the winner is Son of Grok with his Caveman Custard, but for a good egg custard recipe, the winner is definitely Mark Sisson!  Here’s the recipe for Mark Sisson’s egg custard (for those who don’t want to follow all the links):

Ingredients:
5 eggs
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups Original flavored almond milk
12 teaspoons (1/4 cup) light blue agave syrup* (or honey)
ground cinnamon or nutmeg
six petit creuset pots or other small stoneware dishes

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. In a saucepan, combine the milk and agave syrup. In another saucepan, heat 1-2 cups of water (or as much as you will need to fill the baking tray).  Bring both pans to a simmer. Remove the milk and agave from heat.  Lower the heat on the water and keep it warm.
3. In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs and vanilla until yolks are very smooth, about 3 minutes. Add the warm milk and syrup to the eggs, whisk together until well combined.
4. Using a sieve, pour egg mixture so it evenly settles in each dessert cup. Make sure to use oven safe dishes.
5. Place dessert cups in a baking dish big enough so the dessert cups don’t touch one another. Pour hot water from the warm saucepan into the baking dish so that it comes up to the level of the custard on the outside of each individual dish. This water is to prevent the custard from burning. This step is very important.
6. Slide the pan into the oven and bake until custards are set around the edges, about 40 minutes. Allow custards to further set by refrigerating for at least 2 hours. Or serve them right away, warm.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: banana bread
2. Paleo recipes: blackberry frozen yoghurt
3. Paleo recipes: cheesecake base

On investigating chocolate mousse recipes I found that they all had sugar, but did they really need it?  After all, we quite like the taste of 85% cocoa chocolate, so why would you need to add sugar to sweeten it?  Would the mousse come out with the wrong texture if you didn’t have that grainy sugar in the mix? 

Here’s the final recipe I settled on and it’s gone down well both times I’ve made it.

Paleo chocolate mousse

Ingredients:
200g dark chocolate (we use 85% or 90% cocoa)
4 fl oz warm water
3 eggs (separated)
1 tsp stevia (optional)
Pouring cream to serve (optional)

Directions:

1. Break the chocolate up into a large heatproof bowl and add the warm water.
2. Place the bowl over a saucepan of barely simmering water and be sure that the bowl doesn’t touch the water.  Keeping the heat low allow the chocolate to melt, which will take about 6 minutes.  If you leave it too long the chocolate will go grainy and dry, rather than into a smooth paste – if this happens beat the chocolate vigorously with a fork while adding a little warm water.  Continue this process and, if you are lucky, it will eventually turn back to a smooth paste!
3. While the chocolate is melting, beat the egg yolks in a bowl, adding the stevia to this if you are choosing to sweeten the mousse slightly.
4. Take the chocolate off the heat and leave to cool slightly for 2-3 minutes.
5. While the chocolate is cooling, whisk the egg whites in a clean bowl until they form soft peaks (if you over-beat the egg whites you’ll find the mousse is stiffer and airier, but you will also find it harder to fold into the chocolate so you may end up with small lumps of whipped egg white in your chocolate mousse).
6. Mix the beaten eggs yolks into the chocolate – you will see that the chocolate mix starts to thicken slightly.
7. Next, using a clean metal spoon to fold a tablespoon of the egg whites into the chocolate mix, using this to lift the chocolate away from the sides of the bowl.
8. Fold the rest of the egg whites into the bowl a little at a time, taking care not to lose the air out of the egg whites (this is what makes the mousse light and fluffy).
9. Spoon the mousse mix into your chosen serving dish or into small ramekin dishes.  Cover with cling film and leave it in the fridge to set for at least two hours before serving.

Variations:

• The second time I made this (on holiday), the only chocolate available was some 70% raspberry chocolate.  This actually tasted ok, if a little alcoholic (there was a half inch in the bottom of the bowl that wouldn’t set properly, so there probably was some alcohol in it).  It certainly went down well with everyone present.
• Try adding the zest of an orange to the egg yolks when you are beating them and replacing some of the warm water with the juice of an orange (depending on how much juice there is in the orange this may be more or less of the water) to make a chocolate orange mousse.
• Next summer I’m going to try crushing a couple of cups of raspberries into puree, pass this through a sieve to remove the pips, and then add coconut cream until it is the same quantity/consistency as the melted chocolate.  This could then be used instead of the chocolate to make a raspberry and coconut mousse – I’ll let you know what it is like when I’ve tried it.

Related posts:

1. Paleo kitchen experiments: carrot and orange cake
2. Paleo kitchen experiments – pumpkin soup and seeds
3. Paleo recipes: salmon mousse

A site I am particularly keen on for paleo ideas is PaleoFood.com and this recipe comes from their baking page.

Carrot and orange cake - a small slice of heaven

Ingredients:
6 eggs, separated
8 tbsp honey (or a bit less)
1.5 cups (340g, or 2 medium-large) carrots, cooked and pureed
Zest of 1 orange
Juice of half an orange (or 1tbsp frozen orange)
3 cups (260g) almond flour or ground almonds

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 170C.
2. Beat the egg yolks and honey together in a bowl.
3. Add the pureed carrots, orange zest, orange juice and ground almonds and mix thoroughly.
4. Beat the egg whites in a clean bowl until stiff.
5. Fold egg whites into the egg and carrot mix.
6. Grease and line  a 9 inch diameter spring-sided cake tin and spoon the mix into the tin.
7. Bake for about 50 minutes until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.  Warning:  the cake may look a bit burnt on the top but don’t worry about this.
8. Leave the cake to stand in the tin for 15 minutes to cool before turning out onto a cake rack to continue cooling.

If you wanted you could add some sort of coconut frosting but it really doesn’t need it.  It is so moist that it’s delicious just as it comes.  It may look a bit burnt but it doesn’t taste it so it’s not a problem.

It’s also more than sweet enough, so if you don’t have so much of a sweet tooth you may want to cut back on the honey slightly, though my personal tastes would be to leave it as it is.

Storage:

We tried a few storage techniques with this (in the interests of scientific experimentation). 

• The cake remained moist while being left out on a plate for two days, despite having been cut. 
• It continued to keep well in a tin for about six days. 
• On the seventh day the flecks of carrot on the cut surface of the cake started to grow blue mould.
• On day eight the cake tasted mouldy all the way through.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: banana bread
2. Paleo kitchen experiments: chocolate mousse
3. Paleo recipes: carrots with cumin and orange