Daring Bakers April Challenge

Soft desserts are not my bag, especially when soft desserts are combined in some way with my old nemesis--meringue. Why oh why does the DBitS taunt me so? Perhaps one day I'll get the hang of it. The Daring Baker challenge this month was to make a maple mousse in an edible cup. The host for this month included a recipe for your standard eggs and cream mousse in a molded bacon cup, alongside a recipe for vegan mousse with some suggestions for cups made of nuts and chocolate. Obviously, since my blog isn't called "Omni-Squared," I opted for the latter. For the cup, I used a recipe for a thin, lacy, almond meal-based cookie, which was actually very similar to a florentine. These thin, flat cookies spread dramatically when baking, and while they're still warm from the oven, you drape them over a cup to shape them. They cool that way, and voila: edible cups. My cookies ended up being a titch more fragile than I had been hoping, so I managed only a subtle cupping shape, which I feel was nevertheless sufficient to this task. For the mousse, I used a recipe from vegweb, largely because I know exactly what you get when you whip silken tofu with maple syrup, and it doesn't approach anything that I would call mousse. Dip, yes. Mousse, no. For the inquiring minds among you, I used this one. I tweaked the recipe for a maple, rather than a coffee-chocolate, flavor and found it altogether pleasant. More like pudding than mousse, but pleasant all the same. It was particularly tasty with a bit of salted cookie, so that's how C and I ate it. It's not suuuper pretty, but we suffered through. It looks kind of like a weird egg, doesn't it? Harumph.