A crisp cookie base with fluffy clouds of chocolate mascarpone cream and passion fruit curd cream floating on top. 450: Chocolate Passion Fruit Cream Bars

Oops, another way for me to eat mascarpone whipped cream and chocolate. Bummer!

Somehow I’m at post #450! Cheers to 9 years of spending insane amounts on dairy at the grocery store, writing run-on sentences and getting chocolate fingerprints on all my dish towels. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The flavors and basic structure were inspired by Edd Kimber’s passion fruit milk chocolate bars, which look like a lemon bar that got a glow up. (Essentially a baked citrus curd bar but with whipped ganache on top, YUM.) While I’ll definitely make them correctly later in the year when I have fresh passion fruit juice, I pivoted this time to passion fruit curd that I already have on hand. My freezer stash is currently on track to run out just about when it’s time to harvest the next batch of passion fruit. *chef’s kiss*

There should be a guessing game for bakers: you’re given pictures of different mise en place and asked what the end result will be. It would have to be single-player so you don’t annoy all of your non-baker friends, or you’d have to placate them with a giant plate of cookies while you wax eloquent about textures and ratios. I honestly don’t know how well I’d do, considering how many bakes start with these five ingredients!

Unearthed my crank sifter. The brown sugar put up a fight but in the end it was no match.

Ready to be smooshed into the pan.

Much smoosh.

I’m starting to lean away from baking in my glass pans. I get a much more consistent result in metal or ceramic! Plus it’s so much easier to line a metal tin than a rounded-corner glass 8×8.

Folding in more mascarpone whipped cream to keep the curd from oozing wherever it pleases.

Swirling the two flavors would have worked beautifully if they were the same texture, but I called an audible and added melted chocolate in addition to cocoa powder to the chocolate cream to give it more structure. A good idea in theory, but not so much in execution. Edible flowers to the rescue!

I chilled them for as long as I could stand it, but decided the tradeoff of a messy slice shot was worth getting to eat one sooner.

Happy munching!

Cookie crust recipe from Edd Kimber’s book Chocolate Baking