Chocolate Mushroom Vol-au-Vents and Other Canapés
Savoury vegetarian chocolate canapés, including a recipe for chocolate mushroom vol-au-vents. Creamy mushrooms enhanced with a little chocolate and served in puff pastry cases. Retro they might be, but they’re great finger food and wonderfully delicious.
Pidy Pastry Cases
The party season is now in full swing and although I rarely buy ready made pastry, these Gourmet Pidy pastry cases make excellent party fare for a time strapped host. Time and thought can go into creating delicious fillings without worrying about making the pastry and then having to shape it suitably.
Pidy are a Belgium company that has been making their award winning pastry cases since 1952. They provide a range of interesting pastry forms, but have only recently launched into the home cook’s market. Their products are available via Amazon, delis, farm shops and other independent retailers.
Leek & Goat’s Cheese Canapés
Veggie Cups are an innovative range made with 30% vegetable juice. Because I found these to be particularly intriguing, I decided to try them first. Mine were beetroot flavoured, which gave them a lovely dark pink colour and an interesting flavour, though not particularly identifiable as beetroot. Other flavours in this range are carrot, celeriac and spinach.
Apart from the beetroot, the only ingredients were flour, sunflower oil, water, yeast and salt. I was particularly pleased to see the lack of e-numbers as I find that bought pastry often has a number of off-putting and unnecessary additives.
As we’d just harvested some of our leeks and I had some mature goats cheese in need of using up, I decided to improvise in my very own version of Ready Steady Cook. Luckily there was some chocolate balsamic in the cupboard.
CT and I managed to demolish all of these leek & goat’s cheese canapés with unseemly gusto. Nuff said.
Leek & Goat’s Cheese Canapés – The Recipe
- Clean and slice a bunch of baby leeks from the garden.
- Sauté in olive oil over a low heat for about 8 minutes along with a finely chopped clove of garlic.
- Stir in 2 tsp chocolate balsamic and leave to simmer for a couple of minutes.
- Place a teaspoon of this mixture at the bottom of 12 beetroot pastry cups.
- Top with a couple of blobs of soft goats cheese.
- Warm in the oven in order to melt the goats cheese. Sadly I came a cropper here and warmed them for too long at too high a temperature and they got a little burnt around the edges. Five minutes at 170℃ (150℃ fan, 338℉, Gas 3) is more like it.
- Add a few pomegranate seeds and serve.
Spoonettes
The spoonettes packed in a box of twelve are really quite adorable. They are slightly larger than a teaspoon and would be perfect for a really indulgent filling. I was going to fill them with a goat’s cheese chocolate ganache for a recent party, but time was not on my side.
In the end I kept them for a Christmas appetiser instead and filled them with the most delicious bright green pea pâté.
The spoon ingredients also made me happy, consisting as they did of flour, sunflower oil, butter, water, salt and sugar. Sadly they didn’t all arrive in one piece and a couple of the spoons had lost their handles.
Chocolate Mushroom Vol-au-Vents
I haven’t come across vol au vents in a very long time and I couldn’t repress a little chuckle when I saw them. Mushroom vol-au-vents are somehow so reminiscent of the Seventies. I never thought I’d end up making some. However, I happened to come across a recipe for mushroom and cheese pies over at A Little Piece of Heaven on a Plate, which I found quite appealing.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was adapting the recipe and using it to fill the four square vol-au-vent cases I’d been sent. Surprise, surprise, I managed to smuggle some chocolate in.
Both the garlic and thyme came from our garden.
I wasn’t quite so happy about the ingredients for these vol-au-vents pastry cases; they had a fair number of e-numbers and the dreaded palm oil too. Luckily, you can buy decent (ish) butter puff pastry and cut your own vol-au-vent cases out instead of buying them ready made. You could even make your own.
The cases are substantial in size, but even so, I managed to overdo the mushroom filling and made enough to fill eight cases rather than the four that were provided. This was fine; we had one meal of vol-au-vents and another with mushrooms on toast. Both were delectable and I can’t understand why I was so sniffy about mushroom vol-au-vents.
Other Pastry Case Fillings You Might Like
- Aduki bean dip with miso (vegan)
- Avocado & egg filling
- Minted broad bean spread
- Moroccan carrot dip
- Smoky ham dip (vegan)
Keep in Touch
Thanks for visiting Tin and Thyme. If you make these chocolate mushroom vol-au-vents, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. And do please rate the recipe. Have you any top tips? Do share photos on social media too and use the hashtag #tinandthyme, so I can spot them.
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If you’d like more pastry recipes, follow the link and you’ll find I have quite a lot of them. All delicious, of course.
Choclette x
Mushroom Vol-au-Vents. PIN IT.
Chocolate Mushroom Vol-au-Vents – The Recipe
Chocolate Mushroom Vol-au-Vents
Ingredients
- 30 g salted butter
- 1 bunch spring onions (scallions) (scallions) – chopped
- 200 g white mushrooms or chestnut mushrooms – cleaned and thinly sliced
- 2 cloves garlic finely chopped
- 4 sprig fresh thyme
- 1 tsp balsamic vinegar (I used 2 tsp chocolate balsamic with no additional chocolate)
- 5 g dark chocolate
- 1 tbsp double cream (heavy cream)
- 50 g full fat cream cheese
- good grinding of black pepper
- 8 vol-au-vents cases
Instructions
- Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium to low heat, then sauté the onions for a few minutes.
- Clean and slice the mushrooms, then add them to the pan.
- Add the garlic and the thyme leaves. Stir and leave to cook for five minutes.
- Add the balsamic vinegar and chocolate and leave to simmer for a couple of minutes.
- Add a the cream, cream cheese and pepper. Turn off the heat and stir until the cheese had melted and all is nicely combined.
- Heat the vol-au-vent cases in the oven at 170℃ (150℃ fan, 338℉, Gas 3) for 5 minutes.
- Cut out the middle square with a sharp knife.
- Divide the filling between the cases and place the cut out square on top to act as a lid or maybe a jaunty hat.
- Can serve at room temperature, but they’re at their best warm.
Notes
Nutrition Estimate
Sharing
As my chocolate mushroom vol-au-vents contained thyme from my garden, I’m sending them off to Karen of Lavender and Lovage for her Cooking with Herbs event.
Thanks to the food PR agency CLIP Creative and PR for the Pidy samples. There was no requirement to write a positive review. As always, all opinions are my own.
WOW! What a FABULOUS entry into cooking with herbs for December and my spicy theme, and such lovely photos too! Thanks so much and Happy New Year! Karen
Cute! I love these vol au vents. Whatever the trend they will always be great party nibbles! Have a fab time at Christmas! X
I love how you manage to work the chocolate in there. I am intrigued as to how it tastes.
Great job! The vol au vents were really tasty, would never have thought of adding chocolate though!
I don’t care how ’70’s they are I love a vol au vent.
Fabulous Kath, I sort of suspected you might 🙂
What a great imagination you have!
Haha Suelle – imagination or obsession? It’s a moot point 😉