Chocolate Délice with Salted Caramel & Malted Barley Ice Cream

From David Everitt-Matthias' Essence: Recipes from Le Champignon Sauvage, an inspirational cookbook from the chef behind the restaurant that has been quietly revolutionising modern British cooking from sleepy Cheltenham.

Unlike most restaurant cookbooks, the recipes from this highly original volume are very approachable - emphatically not because anything's been dumbed down for us home cooks all too often kindly presumed to be incapable of comprehending steps worded in sentences with more than two independent clauses, but because each complex recipe has been carefully broken down into the separate components, with detailed instructions on how to create each element, thus making the book especially appealing to the sort of home cook apt to deconstruct and mix-and-match as mood and resources dictate.

Seamless, dissolve-on-tongue chocolate mousse. Chewy, salty, buttery caramel. Nostalgic, velvety, unmistakably malted ice cream. Crisp, crackling sesame wafer. Aside from being a combination of tastes and textures that a clunky string of adjectives really doesn't do justice to, what's really interesting is the method used to stabilise the olive oil (yes, olive oil) and bitter chocolate mixture. The trick is to proceed as if mounting a mayonnaise, thus giving the olive oil something to adhere to. The resulting texture is extraordinary, quite unlike your garden variety chocolate mousse, good as it may be.

That said, what moved me off the sofa and towards the kitchen was not so much theoretically interesting technique, fascinating as it is, but good old greed - I have a huge weakness for salted caramel, and even on mere paper, this dessert promised to be a real winner.