Chocolate Orange Lasagne

As a child, ask me what my favourite food was and hands down, every time I would say my mum’s lasagne. Being brought up in an Italian family I was weaned on pasta, even before a lot of my classmates knew what the ‘weird, radical’ foreign food was. To me it was more common than a fried egg and chips for tea!

And when I saw that my friend Jac over at vegetarian website – Tinned Tomatoes – had a new challenge this month called Pasta Please, and that the theme was cheese, I knew I had to enter. But being Cakeyboi and predominately sweet, my thoughts turned to sweet lasagne!

Luckily I had also been asked to try some products for a company called Sugar And Crumbs who supply high quality baking ingredients, including flavoured cocoa powders and icing sugars. I was sent chocolate orange cocoa powder, white chocolate blossoms (little curls of chocolate) and natural orange icing sugar. (I will be using the orange icing sugar at a later date).

I adapted a recipe I found at Food Network and substituted the regular cocoa powder and orange zest, with the chocolate orange cocoa powder. I also used chopped white chocolate instead of chocolate chips, and half the amount of ricotta cheese (half the fat!).

Yield: one 8”x8” baking dish worth

Ingredients:

5 sheets of fresh lasagne – (not dried)

500 grams ricotta cheese

110 grams icing sugar

50 grams chocolate orange cocoa powder

2 large eggs

150 grams chopped white chocolate

50 grams pistachio nuts, chopped and toasted

50 grams of white chocolate blossoms

Method:

Preheat your oven to 170oC. Line an 8”x8” pan with foil.

In a bowl whisk together the cheese, sugar, cocoa powder and eggs until smooth. Stir through the chopped chocolate. Spread one quarter of this mix on the bottom of the baking pan and sprinkle with some of the nuts. Lay a sheet and a half of lasagne on top. Then repeat with the cheese mix, nuts, more lasagne, finishing with the cheese and nuts. 

Pop into the oven for 30 minutes. The lasagne will puff up slightly. Remove from the oven and sprinkle the chocolate blossoms on top.

Allow this to cool for at least half and hour and then divide into squares ready to be devoured. As pasta is neither sweet nor savoury, this works so well with the chocolate orange flavour. The nuts give great texture and the chopped white chocolate gives a nice contrast to the cheesey chocolate filling.

As said, I am entering this into the Pasta Please challenge, hosted this month by Tinned Tomatoes. And the Sugar and Crumbs ingredients were brilliant – the blossoms were handy to use straight from the bag and the flavoured cocoa, really was a new one for me! They are to be introducing lots of new products and if I am sent any to try out, I will be sure to share them with you. Enjoy!

Disclosure Statement: I received the Sugar and Crumbs items free to review and was not committed to writing a favourable review. The views expressed are my own.