Chocolate Rum Mascarpone Bites - Un Dolce Facilissimo

I tend to have a pretty strong sweet tooth and besides cooking up a pasta dish or my new favorite thing to make, focaccia, I enjoy making/baking/eating sweets. Ever since I was a bambina (little girl) I was obsessed with chocolate – literally all things chocolate and I don’t think that has stopped now that I’m in my thirties. Fast forward to present day and now that we are shopping about once a week, I’m trying to be extra careful about letting food go to waste (especially the chocolate) What I have learned about the Italian lifestyle in the kitchen is that NOTHING goes to waste. There is always a way to utilize those scraps that might end up in the trash. For me, I took a look at the uova di Pasqua (chocolate eggs) that we had leftover from Pasqua (Easter) and the half container of mascarpone in the fridge that was begging to be used in another tiramisu, and thought that it was time to try something different. I’m going to be honest here and say that after watching a handful of episodes of Master Chef Italia, my brain has been engaged to be a bit more creative in the kitchen.

With only a few additional pantry ingredients, I was able to create a dessert that is pasticceria photo-worthy and a sweet delicious ending to your cena.

What you will need:

Small Cupcake Wrappers
Small Cupcake Tin (optional)
Paintbrush
Double Broiler is great, or you can make your own with a Pot and giant ceramic bowl
Pastry Bag or use a Ziplock bag and cut the end off (Saccapoche)
Rubber Spatula
Knife
Little glass or plastic cup (optional for leftovers)

Ingredients:

1/4 cup Dark Chocolate (80-100g cioccolato fondente)
2-3 Tbsp or 2-3 large pieces of Milk Chocolate (60g cioccolato latte)
1 Tbsp Rum (un cucchiaio di rum)
3/4 cup of Mascarpone (120g mascarpone)
1/2 tsp of Vanilla Extract (mezzo cucchiaino di vaniglia)
q.b. Hazelnuts (Nocciole)
q.b. Pistachios (pistacchi)

*q.b. stands for quanto basta which means how much is needed for that particular thing that you are cooking – you will see this a lot in Italian cooking because it is not a precise measurement. It depends on how much salt or additional thing that you believe the dish needs*

Preparation:

Start by boiling a pot of water on the stove and preparing your bagno maria (double broiler) or in my case I used a larger ceramic bowl on top of the water in order to melt the dark chocolate.
Keep an eye on your dark chocolate and still until nice and creamy with your rubber spatula. Once everything has melted, move the chocolate from the stove and set to the side.

Take your small cupcake tin and place all paper cupcake liners in each of the holes.
Using a clean paintbrush, dip into the dark chocolate and paint the insides of the paper wrappers. I did about 2-3 coats in each wrapper in order to make sure I layered the chocolate thick enough. *Note: not all of my chocolate cups came out perfectly – I ended up utilizing the little glass bowls in the end since I had left over mascarpone filling. Therefore, make sure you’re not doing too thin of a layer of chocolate*
Once all of your small wrappers have been painted with the dark chocolate, place them in the fridge or the freezer for at least one hour. I used the freezer because I wanted to make sure that they fully hardened.

While waiting, you can easily prepare your filling. To start, clean off your double broiler or boil and start to melt down your milk chocolate.
Once fully melted, set this off to the side for a few minutes as you don’t want to add piping hot melted chocolate right to the mascarpone.
Measure out your mascarpone, add rum, vanilla and the creamy melted milk chocolate and mix together with a spoon.

Once fully combined, prepare your pastry bag in order to add the filling. I take a larger glass cup so that my bag stands upright and it’s easier for filling and then twisting to a close. If you are using a small ziplock bag, fill and cut off one small corner of the bag that you will squeeze your filling through.

Set this aside and when ready, pull out your dark chocolate cups out of the freezer.
Start to carefully remove the paper wrappers to leave a small chocolate cup ready for filling.
Once all of the paper has been removed and if you’re lucky (I wasn’t) none of them broke, then it’s time to grab your pasty bag filled with that rum/chocolatey goodness and fill each cup with a bite sized amount of your filling.

After you have used all of your filling, take a sharp knife or even a food processor and gently chop your pistachios and hazelnuts for toppings. I even used some of my broken dark chocolate cups to garnish mine.
Plate then up and either enjoy immediately, or place in the fridge until ready to consume (but do not leave longer than 3 days).

It’s really hard to eat just one of these, really hard…also because the combination or rum and chocolate is just fantastic. I hope that these little fancy bites add a bit of dolce to your vita right now and feel free to get creative because the filling alone is just as great by itself!

Let me know if you have any suggestions and if you ended up making this recipe in the comments below.

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