Chocolate, White Velvet, Caramel, Vanilla Mousse Torte

Recently I've been incorporating some preparedness and sustainability habits into my family's daily life.  These habits include recycling, composting, and canning.  While canning is a wonderful way to prepare food for any emergency it has also brought thoughtfulness about never letting any food go to waste.  Almost every morsel of food that enters my house is eaten, stored, canned or combined to create a complete dish or meal.

Once, I tried to feed my family eggplant parmesan.  It did not go over well.  Even with the mounds of cheese loaded into the dish and the eggplant heavily breaded it was still a bust.  My heart couldn't handle throwing all the leftovers down the drain knowing it would never be eaten as is again.  So I put it in the food processor, mixed it with more marinara sauce and disguised it as pasta sauce covering playful bow-tie noodles.  It was eaten whole-heartedly by the fam, some even going back for seconds, never guessing it was the "healthy, vegetable" dish recreated.  These are the puzzles of no food going to waste that lead me to try things like this layered torte.

My latest creation is a Chocolate, White Velvet, Caramel, Vanilla Mousse Torte.  I had batter from a previous chocolate torte left over and an extra sheet of White Velvet cake stored in the freezer.  All this came together as I was pondering what to do with a batch of experimental vanilla mousse.  The mousse was wonderful by itself but wanted to be part of a larger portrait of confectionary flavors.  You would think that 3 flavors and 3 textures could make a well rounded slice of cake but no....  It needed one more flavor and texture.  With ingredients already supplied in the pantry I decided a creamy caramel was the glue to hold all these flavors together.

The bottom layer is a rich dark chocolate torte followed by white chocolate velvet cake.  A layer of creamy caramel was poured over the top and set in the fridge to stiffen a bit before icing the cake with vanilla mousse.  A springform pan used for baking the chocolate torte on the bottom served well to hold the next two layers of velvet cake and caramel.  Until the caramel shaped up around the cake it needed a container to keep it from oozing everywhere.

Sugar in different forms is usually a safe bet for tastiness but you can never be over confident.  To much sugar can cause the heart aching task of throwing it all down the drain.  According to my taste testers this is a keeper!

Many Sugar Kisses,
Consuelo