We’ve been to three Brazilian restaurants recently and all offered a dessert I’d never had before: Mousse de Maracujá. Maracuya (also called Passion Fruit) is one of my favorite fruits – intensely tart with crunchy seeds.

When coming up with recipes, I usually look at a bunch, omit outlying ingredients, average the amounts, and come up with what I hope is a typical version. For this one, some recipes were minimal, with only Frozen Maracuya, Heavy Cream, Sweetened Condensed Milk, a couple use Table Cream (20% fat, which makes a more firm mousse), one recommends Gelatin for a semi-solid consistency, and one recipe even included Cream Cheese. Some say to blend a long time (6-8 minutes), others claim that less blending is crucial.

Despite my skepticism about the AI hype, this time I asked DuckDuckGo’s LLM (GPT-4o mini) to synthesize a recipe. The one it came up with is quite simple, adding only Gelatin to give it a more firm texture, which I hope will be similar to the Passion Fruit Cremeaux we made 5 years ago. FWIW, I also asked ollama (gpt-oss:20b) on my Mac but it gave me a much more complicated recipe adding Egg Yolks, Butter, Whole Eggs, Vanilla. I’ll stick with the simpler one.

If you don’t have Gelatin or are vegetarian, the LLM suggested substituting 2 g Agar Agar; see below. Further prompting to replace both Gelatin and Agar had it substitute 100 g extra Heavy Cream, whipped and folded into the blended mixture, but won’t go there this time.

Makes 5 small (165 ml) ramekins as shown above.

250 g Passion fruit pulp, frozen

200 g Sweetened Condensed Milk

200 g Heavy Cream, 35% fat

5 g Gelatin, unflavored (or 2 g Agar Agar)

30 ml Water

taste Sugar

Thaw the frozen Passion Fruit Pulp.

In a small bowl, dissolve the 5 grams of Gelatin in 30 milliliters of water; let it sit for about 5 minutes to bloom, then gently heat until fully dissolved. If using Agar, in a small saucepan, combine 2 grams of Agar with 30 milliliters of Water; bring the mixture to a boil while stirring constantly and let it simmer for about 2-3 minutes until the Agar is completely dissolved; remove from heat.

In a blender, combine the thawed Passion Fruit Pulp, Sweetened Condensed Milk, and Heavy Cream. Blend until smooth, about 5 minutes. I used a stick blender, moving it up and down to ensure it was well combined.

Slowly add the dissolved Gelatin / Agar to the blender, mixing well until combined.

Taste the mixture and add sugar if desired, blending again to incorporate.

Pour the mixture into serving cups. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours or until set.

Serve chilled, optionally garnished with fresh passion fruit seeds or a sprinkle of grated chocolate.

Next Time

The texture was good: not fluid but not so firm as to retain its shape on a spoon.

The only fault was that there were shards of the Gelatin which were not incorporated. This was probably due to drizzling the warm liquid into the cold Maracuya mixture, causing it to seize before the stick blender could incorporate it thoroughly.

Next time: use a regular blender to incorporate the Gelatin immediately, and warm the Maracuya mixture a bit to prevent seizing.