Coffee and banana mousse

It's been a few weeks since I've had the chance to do some more exploratory cooking with flavours from the book, but I had a bit of a binge today and managed to cook three things from two sub-sections from the 'roasted' chapter of the 'The Flavour Thesaurus'. To continue the flow of the book, I firstly focused on coffee.

I have worked in cafés and restaurants since I was 17 and have always had access to freshly roasted and ground coffee. As a result, I've become a little bit of a coffee snob! I was really looking forward to making something really yummy other than boring coffee sponge or a mocha coffee.

Reading through the chapter, I came across coffee and banana. The only recipe that was suggested was to make a banoffee pie with coffee cream, but I find banoffee pie a bit mundane so I did some research and came across a coffee and banana mousse. I've tried to make chocolate mouse before with eggs but it was a disaster! Luckily this mousse recipe uses cream and there isn't an egg in sight!

Firstly, I had to heat a tin of condensed milk with butter, a couple of shots of espresso and then stirred in some cocoa powder.

After leaving the mixture to cool, I stirred in a couple of bananas that I had finely chopped. I then whipped some double cream until it was medium peaks and then folded the coffee/banana mixture into the double cream.

This wasn't as adventurous as the bacon, maple and chocolate concoction but it was extremely tasty and its a good recipe for a family dessert. Although I didn't use a lot of coffee, I think it could have done with a little more, maybe another shot to offset the sweetness of the condensed milk and another banana too. I always feel that the two main ingredients should always be the stars of the show! (Those are the hands of my friend who was my sous chef for the day!)