Fabulous Fillings: Chocolate-Hazelnut Kinda-Sorta Mousse

The United States of America has been responsible for many wonderful edible things: fortune cookies, s'mores, buffalo wings and Tina Fey to name but a few. But it also has a disturbing propensity for using way too much sugar in recipes, a truly horrific addiction to vegetable shortening and a general disregard for arterial health.
Another ingredient that they somehow consider to be food is Cool Whip, an aerosol container of artificial whipped cream that is the key ingredient in dozens of American desserts. Let's be clear, this is not the canned whipped cream you might be familiar with from your local supermarket. The ingredients in original Cool Whip are: water, hydrogenated vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, skim milk, light cream and less than 2% sodium caseinate (a milk derivative), natural and artificial flavor, xanthan and guar gums, polysorbate 60, sorbitan monostearate and beta carotene (as a coloring). Mmm, yum, I love a bit of sorbitan monostearate on my apple pie!

This weekend I was asked to make a birthday cake for a 70 year-old woman who was also celebrating her school reunion so her son requested a design that would reflect her school days. It just so happens that the school in question was also the school *I* went to so I had something of an advantage. The recipient's all-time favourite cake is a hazelnut torte so I went to work researching recipes for a hazelnut cake that would work as a solid base for a fondant cake. I came across this recipe from Martha Stewart that is just delicious but I couldn't use the praline buttercream because I wanted to fill this cake with something indulgent and that necessitates a ganache covering to keep it all contained (though I might make a batch of that praline to bathe in this weekend). 

Instinct told me that Nutella was going to be the perfect bridge between my layers of airy hazelnut cake and rich, velvety ganache but I didn't want it to simply taste like I had slathered some breakfast spread in the middle of my cake.  I came across a recipe that sounded perfect but required that blasted Cool Whip. It occurred to me that aerosol cream (real cream I mean) has stabiliser in it so it might do the trick in terms of keeping the mousse 'high' (where whipped cream would simply collapse) without the scary ingredients. A new, "oh-my-goodness-how-did-I-eat-half-a-bowl-of-this delicious choc-hazelnut filling" was born. 

Make it at your peril.

Ingredients:

250g cream cheese - softened

1 cup icing sugar

¾ cup Nutella

½ tsp vanilla

1 can of whipped cream

Method:

1. Beat softened cream cheese until light and fluffy.

2. Add Nutella, sugar and vanilla. Beat until smooth.

3. Enjoy squirting whipped cream in big circles on top of your Nutella mix. Fold it in and taste, still too cream-cheesey? Fold in some more. Repeat until it reaches maximum deliciousness. 

Store in the refrigerator until ready to use. Or eat it with a spoon.

Oh and the cake? This is what I came up with:

 Our school motto was "Let Your Light Shine" so 

I put the school logo and "Still Letting Her Light Shine

After 70 Years!" on top of the cake. 

 The school chapel, the 1960s uniform, house badges.

 Barham House, the fig tree...

 The green gate, the church...

 More of the fig tree...

 Peanut alley, the mulberry tree, house badges.

It's amazing how stressful it is to hand over a cake

with a completely original design and an untasted

recipe but, thank goodness, apparently she loved it.

It was the hit of the reunion!