Raw Food Dessert: Chocolate Mousse Tart (p1) - An Easy To Make Raw Food Recipe

I love raw desserts. Raw desserts are so much better for you than the traditional versions because they're free of white flour, white sugar, saturated fats, dairy products, and wheat--ingredients that many people are trying to avoid. If you bring a raw dessert to a party, I guarantee you that people are really going to appreciate having something to eat that doesn't have those ingredients in it. But what's really amazing about raw desserts is how great they taste, and they're so easy to make. In many cases, it just takes minutes. Any dessert that you make cooked, you can make raw. Cakes, cookies, pies, tarts, crisps, ice creams, mousses, puddings, candies. All of it. And in my book Raw Food Made Easy For 1 or 2 People, I give examples of all those different kinds of desserts. I have a sweet tooth, and I like dessert. There are just some basic substitutions to keep in mind. Ground nuts and coconut take the place of flour and butter, dried fruits and other natural sweeteners replace sugar, and avocado replaces cream, butter, and eggs. Now it might seem strange to use avocado in a dessert, but if you think about it, cream and butter and eggs don't really have that much taste on their own. They just make desserts taste rich. And that's what the avocado does. Once you cover it up with different flavorings, you won't even know it's there. It's just going to make the dessert rich and creamy. I'm going to make a gourmet chocolate mousse tart that looks like it just stepped out of a bakery window, but you'll see how easy it is, much easier to make than the traditional baked version. Let's start off with the crust. This crust is made out of walnuts and coconut. That's going to take the place of the flour and the butter. And also, some dates. These are Medjool dates, which is a variety of date that's very soft and sweet, and that's going to bind the crust ingredients together and give a little bit of sweetness. And I'll add a pinch of salt as well. We're going to make this pie crust in the food processor, which is the necessary tool for making a lot of raw food desserts-- --the cakes, the cookies, and the pie crusts. Usually, I soak my nuts and seeds, but there is an exception to that, and that's the desserts. I'm using unsoaked walnuts right now, and the reason for that is I want a dry and crumbly texture in this pie crust. Same is true if you were going to use this nuts in a cake. You don't want it to be soggy or wet; you want it dry and crumbly. So these walnuts are not soaked. I'll go ahead and add those to the food processor. I'm also going to add some shredded, dried, unsweetened coconut, and that gives a lightness to the crust. If you use only nuts, the crust is going to be denser, but with the coconut, it'll be a little bit lighter. This really is going to take the place of flour. And a pinch of salt gives a nice, buttery taste to the crust. And we'll go ahead and process those ingredients until they're crumbly. That's looking good. It's resembling coarse crumbs, and that's just what we want. Now I'm going to add the dates, just enough to bind these ingredients together. I removed the pits from these dates. All I did was pull them apart in half and just removed the pit. And I recommend buying dates that have the pits in them and taking out the pits yourself because if you buy them already pitted, they can sometimes be a little bit dry and they won't process as evenly. I'm just breaking these in half so that they process a little more quickly. And now I'm going to process this mixture until it just begins to start binding together. That looks great. It s just starting to stick together. When I press it between my thumb and fingers, it holds, and that's what you're looking for. So now we're going to shape it. You don't need to roll out a raw pie crust. That's also another thing that makes it easier. It's shaped with your hands. So I'm going to pour this crumbly crust into a tart pan. You could also use a pie plate. I'm just trying to make it a little bit fancier here. And this is a tart pan with a removable bottom. The bottom just comes right out, and that'll come in handy when we're unmolding it later. So the first step to shaping a raw pie crust is to evenly distribute the crumbs with your thumb and fingers. And I want to do this before I start pressing down at all. I want to get all those crumbs right where I want them. So I'm pushing them up the sides. There's a little piece of date there. We'll just take that out. Sometimes that happens. You don't want to over-process your crust, so it's better to under-process it and have a little bit of date in there, and you can take it out. If you over-process, it can get a little bit oily. So I'm just distributing these crumbs, and I'm making a lip up the side. You can see there's about half-inch to a three-fourth inch lip here, and we'll need that when we press the sides in. And then I'm spreading the rest of the crumbs on the bottom. It might look like we have a lot of crust here, but once we press it down, it's really going to condense. All right, so I've got those crumbs distributed and a three-fourths inch lip around the sides, and now I'm going to begin pressing down the bottom. Just pressing firmly with my fingertips. I used walnuts and coconut in this crust, but there are so many variations. You could use almonds; you could use macadamia nuts. That would be delicious, very buttery tasting. And I'm pressing especially firmly in this ridge where the bottom meets the sides, and that's important so that when you cut the pie or tart, it doesn't slope and you have a nice angle. Okay. We've got the bottom pressed down. Now I'm going to work on the sides. So the first step is I'm going to press in the sides using the side of one of my thumbs, and I'm going to use the other hand to just guide the crumbs so that they don't fall off. It doesn't need to look perfect yet. We can always go back and clean it up. I'm just pressing this into the flutes at the side of the tart pan, and this would be the same step if you were using a pie plate. You just wouldn't have those flutes. Now I'll turn the pie or the tart and just continue pressing. All right, so now that I've pressed in the sides, I can just go around with my fingertips and just kind of clean up any of those edges, making it uniform. Just pinching. And there you have a homemade raw tart crust, much easier than rolling it out. I'm going to use this crust right away, as soon as I make my filling. But if you want to make the crust in advance, you can store it in your freezer for up to three months.