Cocoa Leaves and Cocoa Butter Cream with A Touch of Milk and Licorice

A Michel Bras recipe, from Essential Cuisine: Michel Bras. Despite its unusual appearance, it's probably one of the less time-consuming desserts to make from the book, something like this multi-component number being more typical of the section.

With dessert in particular, I tend to eat with my eyes first. But really, looks aside, there were a number of things I found rather exciting about the recipe.

That's cocoa butter cream, as opposed to cocoa buttercream. In other words, the filling uses pure cocoa butter as an ingredient, something that, much like cocoa nibs, has been recently introduced to the home baker's horizons. Chocolatiers have long used it to manipulate the texture and mouthfeel of ganache centers, and increasingly, its uses are being explored in the rest of the pastry kitchen, primarily as a natural thickener for mousses and such like in lieu of gelatine (for the definitive book on the subject, check out Philippe Bertrand & Philippe Marand's L'Eveil des Sens).

And of course, the recipe presented the perfect excuse to go buy a big bunch of long slender metal tube molds, which were of course, absolutely necessary for shaping the pastry leaves. I didn't plan far in advance enough to hunt down the 14mm diameter tubes specified but quite happily settled for the more readily available 25mm ones - in other words, cannoli molds. This resulted in bodacious waves rather than delicate ripples.

Last but not least, it, like several of the other recipes in the book, is a refreshing take on the millefeuille, bringing the classic contrast between crisp and creamy to a heightened level thanks to its ultra-crispness/ultra-creaminess and a brand new cast of flavours.

The trickiest part comes with handling the single-ply phyllo leaves. Each phyllo rectangle is brushed on both sides with melted butter then sprinkled with a sugar flavoured with cocoa, coffee and licorice extract - a certain sense of urgency must inform the proceedings if the phyllo is not to dry out, lose its pliancy, and generally become too brittle to handle. The flavoured phyllo rectangles are modelled by interleaving with the tube molds and baked briefly in a hot oven until the sugar caramelizes. Extricating the "cocoa leaves" intact from the molds takes a bit of practice - while very crisp, they are also very fragile - but the initial broken shards make for excellent cook's perks, so one need not feel too aggrieved.

Just prior to serving, the leaves are lined with the cocoa butter cream (gently whipped cream folded into a liquid mixture of cocoa butter and sugar) and stacked. To finish, milk reduction, cocoa licorice caramel and more of the flavoured sugar.