The Daring Bakers make chocolate pavlova!

Lots of pictures and not so many words today. I'm sure many of you are grateful! I made this challenge only days after it was revealed, which is very unusual for me. As I didn't write it up then, I can't remember much. What I do remember is that it was delicious, and I took it on a picnic along with the Daring Cooks' challenge of pâté and bread. This pav wasn't exactly what I think about for a picnic dessert, but it was certainly good. Even though I'm not a big fan of chocolate, the chocolate-mascarpone mousse was rich and delicious. The meringues were nice and crisp, and the crème anglaise-mascarpone-Amaretto mixture was the most amazing dessert sauce ever. 

I made a vanilla meringue, as chocolate on chocolate does not appeal. I'm glad I did, because this was already an incredibly rich dessert. I garnished with some wonderful organic cherries I had found on sale that morning. They were the reason I decided to make this dessert on a very busy day, what with the pâté and bread I was already making. 

I had fun piping the meringue and mousse in swirls. This is the sauceless version I packed up for the picnic, so we could add it at the last moment. I may even have tried to lick the jar it was in. The one I kept right-side-up travelled surprisingly well. 

They looked just like this on our picnic. In our minds' eye, anyway. But, I still had a few baked meringue bases left over, so a few days later, on a very cloudy and rainy day, I put together a blackberry curd pavlova with the curd left from these shortcakes. Click on the link for the curd recipe. It was a perfect combination, though the colour looks a bit weird in the gray light.

A few days after that, with my move date looming, I thought I had better use up some of the egg whites that were still in the fridge. This time I made a soft, marshmallowy meringue in the true pavlova style. There was lots of discussion in the forums about whether a crisp meringue was actually a pavlova, but I just stayed out of it and kept baking. I topped this pav with some strawberry-white chocolate mousse left over from the wedding cake, and topped it with some fresh strawberry coulis. This was fantastic! I'd go make another now if all my baking equipment weren't in storage. 

Blog-checking lines: The June 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Dawn of Doable and Delicious. Dawn challenged the Daring Bakers’ to make Chocolate Pavlovas and Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse. The challenge recipe is based on a recipe from the book Chocolate Epiphany by Francois Payard

Original challenge recipes can be found here.