Live Chocolate Mousse

As I mentioned yesterday it is heating up here in the desert and the thought of turning on the oven to bring sweet treats to my grumbling tummy is not a pleasant one. Sometimes I imagine my famine filled face passing out as the oven heat waves leave me light headed. From there I fall gracefully into a heap on the kitchen floor and my dessert, my master prize, burns to a blackened mess all the while I dream of butterflies. I will awaken to the smell of burning delicacies and cry my weak heart out as I find my pie, my chocolate cake, my sweet tray of cookies have become inedible. Though this has never happened, I fear it. I have haunting nightmares of burned sweets.

But I will not fear, there is hope that lies outside of the soul scorching oven, it is called...the refrigerator!

Okay, enough of the drama, yesterday I mad a delicious chocolate mousse out of avocados. It sounds crazy but it is not only a healthy treat but an amazingly tasty treat! The recipe is adapted from a simple recipe from the Vegetarian Times magazine.



1 1/2 avocados
1 banana
5 medium strawberries
1/4 cup raw cacao powder (you can use cocoa if you like)
1/4 cup raw agave nectar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Additional fruit to top the mousse with (optional)

Toss all ingredients into a food processor or blender, mix until smooth and refrigerate for at least one hour. Enjoy!

Gooey Caramel Pecan Cupcakes

It never rains in Arizona, ever. Those of us living in the desert pray for rain. We practically shout at the top of our lungs and perform intricate dances to bring forth tiny droplets of heaven to quench our parched landscape. The land dwellers of the southwest must have been extra good this year because it has been raining consistently for the last 4 days in our arid state. What is a bike riding girl to do? I could go outside and get soaked to the bone or stay inside bake up some delicious cupcakes and curl up to a great book. Since I finished all 1000 plus pages of "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace I really only had one thing I could do, bake more cupcakes! I used the Basic Chocolate Cupcake recipe from VCTOTW with the exception of adding an avocado and omitting the canola oil and I also cut the sugar by 1/4 a cup and ended with a rich chocolaty but not overly sweet cake. It was delicious! I used a chocolate butter cream frosting and drizzled caramel sauce on top. The caramel sauce recipe I got from veganicecream.blogspot. It is quite tasty but a bit too sweet for my tastes; I think next time I will make the caramel sauce with agave nectar. Also I used a coconut milk from So Delicious in both the cake recipe and the caramel sauce and the flavors were complex and rich. All and all I ended up with a fluffy, moist and sinful cake. I am definitely going to bake these again, and I will not be waiting for another rainy day to do so.