Birthday cake

Not the prettiest, but the tastiest:

I made pistachio dacquoise, using my recipe but with chickpea liquid instead of versawhip. I didn't bother with heating the agar mix, I just mixed everything together and assumed that the agar would activate during the baking. (To be honest, I'm actually not even sure whether the agar and xanthan are necessary.)

The filling was a salted caramel mousse, based on a peanut butter mousse from The Voluptuous Vegan. Each dacquoise disk had one side painted with melted chocolate with some roughly ground coriander seeds and some dehydrated ground whole lemon mixed in. I thought I would make some beautiful swirls of chocolate on top but... well, you can see how well that worked. (I didn't count on the chocolate solidifying immediately on the cold mousse!)

I was aiming for the dacquoise to soften slightly, but hoped the chocolate would prevent that from happening too fast. After sitting for about 4 hours, the disks were still quite crisp. 24 hours later, they were quite soggy. Somewhere in between they would've been perfect. The flavour, though, was amazing. I got the idea for the flavour combination from this recipe for Pistachio Millionaire's Shortbread.