Pumpkin Mousse Perfect for Fall

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: If it's Sunday, it must mean Celia Wakefield with another delicious recipe. Today, she has a showy-looking dessert perfect for your Hallowe'en-Thanksgiving-Christmas dinner menu. As usual, I had the chance to gobble it down as fast as possible try a taste, and I can promise you'll enjoy it - as will your guests, who, let's face it, might be a teensy bit tired of the same old pumpkin pie. As usual, there's a video sharing some of Celia's techniques at the end.

 

 

Good morning dear friends, writers and JRW’s. We are in the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, surrounded by yellow and orange everywhere we look. Orange is what I have to share today. 

 

 

Although all the writing I do is memoir based or recipe based I do take care to read each JRW blog and post to learn more about improving my writing. Please feel free to chime in here, though with the expert editor, Julia, who checks my writing, hopefully I won’t make too many bloopers. I know it’s important in writing mysteries to have a main theme and several sub themes and I hope I have achieved that. 

 

Pumpkin is the queen of Fall, and pumpkin pie is universally beloved in the USA and is THE quintessential Thanksgiving dessert. Probably not made from the pumpkins your grade schoolers carved and decorated with magic marker. 

 

 

However arriving in the States as an adult, I found many new customs that I might have heard of but didn’t realize that I would adopt. Once Olivia was headed to nursery school I learned that Halloween and Thanksgiving were celebrations I needed to appreciate, understand and get with the program as any good mom would. 

 

 

Luckily, Dad loved to carve pumpkins with daughter as my poor artistic skills were not even up to pumpkin carving. However I did made awesome costumes, and three year old Olivia was a star in the tiger suit I made from fake fur, which may have been eclipsed by the Queen of Hearts a couple of years later. A circular skirt of silver lame embroidered with BIG hot pink lame hearts. Barbie, eat your heart out. 

 

But Thanksgiving - lots of new food to learn to love. I do remember eating squash or something with marshmallows on it served at a friends house, and it turned out that pumpkin pie is not a fav of mine either.  (However, apple crumble is always welcome.)

 

One year, we were invited to Olivia’s favorite babysitters home for Thanksgiving dinner, and I was asked to bring a dessert. Panic on the pie front. How could I turn pumpkin into something I would be proud to serve and eat? 

 

I hunted through my American cook books and Gourmet Magazine, and found in The Everyday Gourmet, published the previous year by my local Junior League, a pumpkin mousse. It looked good, it fitted the brief, and best of all it had rum in it and wasn’t too complex a recipe. 

 

How did I get involved with the Junior League of Northern Westchester? No, I wasn’t a member but I was the British Butler. The Junior League had undertaken a three year project to build and outfit the first house for domestic violence victims in the area. This was a big deal, and part of their fund raising was The Everyday Gourmet with its 400 recipes. It is the epitome of late ’70’s cooking with lots of cream, butter etc.

 

 

I was asked to teach the volunteers to make the dessert for the book launch at a luncheon at the local country club. It was all very upmarket, and I found they wanted me to work with volunteers to create a hundred or so floating island desserts! All I remember from the prep part is sticky. So many egg whites, so much custard made from scratch, so much beating and shaping. But with my volunteers, we were successful, lauded and appreciated. (My cookbook offering from the British Butler was a demo on working with phyllo pastry, which was in demand by my clients.)

 

 

Where better to look for a different pumpkin dessert than the Junior League book? I found a pumpkin mousse submitted by Nancy Hoggson which I successful presented for  the Thanksgiving dinner. I promise it will be welcomed at any Halloween buffet, decorated with candy corn or eyeballs, or at Thanksgiving Dinner, with whipped cream and pecans, chocolate or my fav: crystalized ginger shards.

INGREDIENTS:

2 packets unflavored gelatin

1/2 cup dark rum (substitutions: orange juice or bourbon)

8 eggs

1 1/3 cups sugar (measure 2/3 cup sugar for half recipe)*

2 cups cooked pumpkin (canned works very well)

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp mace

1/2 tsp ground cloves

2 cups heavy cream, whipped

EQUIPMENT:

Double boiler or set a Pyrex bowl on a small saucepan with simmering water in the bottom

Mixing bowl 

Electric hand beater or a stand mixer

Small bowl for measured spices

Chilled bowl for whipping cream

Whisks and spatulas

METHOD:

• Set double boiler with water in bottom half on stove
• Place the rum or liquid in the top half and sprinkle on the gelatin. Place over the lower pan and watch as the gelatin melts. Keep the heat low and stir gently. When dissolved remove from heat and allow to cool down.
• Measure the other ingredients, mixing the spices in the small bowl.
• Break the eggs into the mixing bowl and start beating. Once they are mixed well increase the speed and add the sugar in a dessert spoon at a time.
• Beat well till the mix increases in volume.
• Sprinkle the spice mix over the eggs and sugar and stir in.
• Add the pumpkin together with the rum-gelatin mixture, and stir with with the electric mixer on low.
• Add the cream to the chilled bowl and whip till stiff
• Mix a couple of spoons of the pumpkin egg into the cream
• Using a spatula fold the cream into the pumpkin mixture till incorporated
• Spoon into individual bowls or into a serving bowl and refrigerate.
• To serve decorate with whipped cream and small candies.

I made a half recipe for us to try which certainly made enough for 6 people. Nancy writes that this quantity serves 8-10 but with other desserts it would serve more.