Monday 28 January 2013

Chocolate Orange Lasagne




As a child, ask me what my favourite food was and hands down, every time I would say my mum’s lasagne. Being brought up in an Italian family I was weaned on pasta, even before a lot of my classmates knew what the ‘weird, radical’ foreign food was. To me it was more common than a fried egg and chips for tea!

And when I saw that my friend Jac over at vegetarian website – Tinned Tomatoes – had a new challenge this month called Pasta Please, and that the theme was cheese, I knew I had to enter. But being Cakeyboi and predominately sweet, my thoughts turned to sweet lasagne!



Luckily I had also been asked to try some products for a company called Sugar And Crumbs who supply high quality baking ingredients, including flavoured cocoa powders and icing sugars. I was sent chocolate orange cocoa powder, white chocolate blossoms (little curls of chocolate) and natural orange icing sugar. (I will be using the orange icing sugar at a later date).

I adapted a recipe I found at Food Network and substituted the regular cocoa powder and orange zest, with the chocolate orange cocoa powder. I also used chopped white chocolate instead of chocolate chips, and half the amount of ricotta cheese (half the fat!).

Yield: one 8”x8” baking dish worth

Ingredients:
5 sheets of fresh lasagne – (not dried)
500 grams ricotta cheese
110 grams icing sugar
50 grams chocolate orange cocoa powder
2 large eggs
150 grams chopped white chocolate
50 grams pistachio nuts, chopped and toasted
50 grams of white chocolate blossoms

Method:
Preheat your oven to 170oC. Line an 8”x8” pan with foil.
In a bowl whisk together the cheese, sugar, cocoa powder and eggs until smooth. Stir through the chopped chocolate. Spread one quarter of this mix on the bottom of the baking pan and sprinkle with some of the nuts. Lay a sheet and a half of lasagne on top. Then repeat with the cheese mix, nuts, more lasagne, finishing with the cheese and nuts. 



Pop into the oven for 30 minutes. The lasagne will puff up slightly. Remove from the oven and sprinkle the chocolate blossoms on top.



Allow this to cool for at least half and hour and then divide into squares ready to be devoured. As pasta is neither sweet nor savoury, this works so well with the chocolate orange flavour. The nuts give great texture and the chopped white chocolate gives a nice contrast to the cheesey chocolate filling.





As said, I am entering this into the Pasta Please challenge, hosted this month by Tinned Tomatoes. And the Sugar and Crumbs ingredients were brilliant – the blossoms were handy to use straight from the bag and the flavoured cocoa, really was a new one for me! They are to be introducing lots of new products and if I am sent any to try out, I will be sure to share them with you. Enjoy!

Disclosure Statement: I received the Sugar and Crumbs items free to review and was not committed to writing a favourable review. The views expressed are my own.

10 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You are so clever! I never thought of using pasta in a sweet dish and it looks beautiful.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wow this is very clever cooking indeed I have used cocoa powder in curry and chilli...never would have thought of using cocoa powder in a lasagne. This will have to be made. Great post cakeyboi!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wowzers....what a clever idea! I guess it's like some of the italian sweet canelloni's or had a nod to baklava even.

    ReplyDelete
  5. What a genius idea! I had not idea you had italian roots, must be why you love cooking so much. Glad to see you got your Sugar and Crumbs products, love the look of those little chocolate curls so convenient.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks for the kind words guys - I might try experimenting with sweet pasta more often - it really is versatile stuff!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Sweet lasagne - that's messing with my head! Looks lovely though!

    ReplyDelete
  8. That is such a brilliant idea. I wonder why I didn't come up with something like this by myself, no. That's really a lovely thing. It looks delicious and for sure is!!!

    ReplyDelete
  9. looks & sounds amazing

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for leaving your comments. I love your feedback and really do appreciate it.

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.