Lerato’s mango mousse with plantain chips

Forgive me for always finding delicious ways to eat plantains. This dessert is so easy to whip up hours before or a day before its needed. You can serve it with slices of bananas, ginger cookies, or a selection of toasted crushed nuts. Like I always say, make it your own. Mine is a simple mango mousse whipped into a sweet cloud with spiced plantain chips on top. Such contrasting flavours that marry incredibly well. I entertained a group of people with these treats and to my surprise a lot of them used the plantain chips as spoons for the mousse. How wonderful to have less washing up to deal with!

Makes 10 small cups & 5 medium sized cups
Preparation time: 20 minutes to 24 hours
Cooking time: 15 minutes

Ingredients
For the mango mousse
2 medium sized mangoes
Juice of 1 lime
250 ml double cream
10g icing sugar

For the plantain chips
2 large sticks of green plantain
1 tsp salt
Freshly cracked black pepper
1 tsp ginger powder

Let’s get cooking! Just a bit of cooking…
Peel the mangoes and puree the flesh in a blender until smooth. Mix the juice of one lime into the pureed mango. Taste the puree to determine sweetness. Whip the cream and sugar until it forms soft peaks. Adjust sugar depending on the sweetness of the mangoes.
Fold the whipped cream into the mango puree and mix well, but gently.

Divide into 5 – 10 cups of glass cups and refrigerate for at least three hours to set. You can also leave to refrigerate overnight. The longer the better.
Plantain chips can also be made well in advance. Pre-heat your oven at 180ºC/gas 6. Peel the skins off the plantains, cut into thin round slices. This can be easily achieved with a mandolin, but a sharp knife will do all the same. Grease a baking tray with oil and line with baking paper. Place the plantain slices onto the baking tray and bake at 180ºC/gas 6 for 15 minutes or until your chips are golden brown. The most important thing is not to burn them, as they can cook quite quickly.

Once baked, take out of the oven and sprinkle with the salt, black pepper and ginger on both sides. Store in an airtight container or bag until you want to eat them. Serve on top of the mango mousse as whole chips or broken into bits. Be sure to serve your guests lots of chips so you wont have to give them spoons. If anyone does complain about no spoons, do not quote me!

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