Spiced Pumpkin Mousse Cups
A rich holiday dessert that allows for small servings and is also gluten and egg free 12-20 servings
½ cup pumpkin puree, unsweetened ½ cup cream cheese, room temperature OR ½ cup fresh goat cheese 1/3 cup golden brown sugar, lightly packed 2 tsp. pure vanilla extract 1 tsp. cinnamon 1/8 tsp. nutmeg ¼ tsp. ground ginger 1 pinch ground allspice 1 pinch ground cardamom
1 cup whipping cream, chilled ¼ cup icing sugar
- Combine the cream cheese and the brown sugar in a large bowl and beat until smooth.
- Mix all of the spices into the pumpkin and then add the spiced pumpkin mixture to the sweetened cream cheese. Mix until well combined.
- In a separate bowl, beat the cold cream with the icing sugar until ‘soft peaks’ are formed (this means that the whipped cream cannot truly hold its shape very well, and still seems just slightly liquid).
- Fold the whipped cream into the pumpkin cream cheese mixture until just combined.
- Pour this filling into a zip-lock bag until the bag is no more than half full, then close the bag and snip the corner so that it can be used to ‘pipe’ the filling into the bottom of small wine glasses or shoot glass.
- Fill the bottom of the glass, then sprinkle a crushed layer candied pecans (recipe below) then cover again with more pumpkin mousse, and top with a whole candied pecan.
Candied pecans
1 cup. white sugar 1 tsp. ground cinnamon 1/2 tsp. salt 1 egg white 450gr pecan halves
- Preheat oven to 280 degrees F (140 degrees C).
- Mix sugar, cinnamon, and salt together in a bowl.
- Whisk egg white in a large separate bowl until frothy.
- Toss pecans in the egg white mixture.
- Mix sugar mixture into pecan mixture until pecans are evenly coated.
- Spread coated pecans onto a baking sheet.
- Bake in the preheated oven, stirring every 15 minutes, until pecans are evenly browned (about 1 hour).