[Chocolate Jelly with Pineapple and Violet]
This is the dessert I served to close my recent spring lamb dinner: it was a few days before Easter so chocolate was definitely in order, but since lamb shoulder is a rather rich cut (though I must note that French lambs seem to be much leaner than their American cousins; French Lambs Don’t Get Fat), I wanted to chase it with a weightless dessert.
Inspiration came in the form of a recipe card I’d clipped from ELLE. It was called Variation Poire-Chocolat, and it was one of Anne-Sophie Pic‘s recettes cultes (staple recipes): a milk-based chocolate jelly made with very little sugar, held together by the power of gelatin, and topped with slivers of vanilla-poached pear and crumbled sablés bretons — butter cookies from Brittany.
And somehow, as it moved through the folds and creases of my brain, her idea morphed into this one: pineapple instead of pears (it is the tail end of the pear season, and I’d found delicious small pineapples aptly named pains de sucre — sugarloaves), violet instead of vanilla (pineapple and violet have been best friends in my mind ever since I tried this bread roll), agar-agar instead of gelatin, and dried slices of pineapple (a riff on my dried pears) for crunch, instead of cookie crumbs.
It turned out that the recipe, as printed, didn’t make nearly enough gelée for four servings: I don’t know what Anne-Sophie feeds her guests before dessert (though I’d love to know), but mine need a little more than three spoonfuls each. So once I’d filled the glasses with a ridiculously thin layer of chocolate jelly, I realized I had to make a second batch. I was out of the 70% chocolate I’d used for the first, so I used a 55% for the second, and this produced a subtle, entirely serendipitous chromatic variation.
The end result was lovely, light and floral, the jelly offering just the right compromise between gelled and creamy. I can picture endless variations on that theme, using different seasonal fruits and flavoring or infusing the jelly with spices to match. But the real discovery here was the dried pineapple, crisp and chewy and sweet as honey. I had made more than I needed for this dessert — I wanted to make sure I had four attractive slices to sit prettily on the rims of the glasses — and we gobbled up the leftovers like candy the next day.