Horchata Mousse: No egg, no bake dessert!

Ancient beyond our imagination, horchata is a sweet beverage with a long history. After its creation in Valencia, Spain, it has been adapted in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and many other countries.

Tigernut or chufa is the main ingredient of Valencian horchata. According to historians, people have been eating and drinking chufa for millennia. Moreover, documents place chufa in Ancient Egypt, where people made food with it. Later, ancient civilizations in Northern Africa and the Arab Peninsula took chufa with them to Spain.

Thanks to the Spanish influence, horchata made its way to Latin America, where it suffered many adaptations.
In Honduras, it’s common to use morro seeds as one of the main ingredients to make it, which gives it a unique taste.

Unlike the Valencian original recipe, Mexican horchata uses rice and cinnamon as the main ingredients. Moreover, this adaptation is quite sweet, which is one of the reasons I chose it to develop the horchata mousse recipe.

Preparing this dessert is easy and takes just a few ingredients. To make the Mexican horchata base, I let the rice soaking with cinnamon overnight. If you want to make your mousse all in one day, you’ll have to leave the rice and cinnamon soaking for at least 5 hours.

Once the soaking time is up, you’ll simply blend the ingredients thoroughly. Then, we get rid of the solids using a strainer.

A traditional Mexican horchata might have added milk. Yet, to make this dessert, we are using sweetened condensed milk. It will provide a nicer texture, consistency, and sweetness.

Finally, to obtain the appropriate consistency for a mousse without using eggs, we chose unflavored gelatin powder. Furthermore, we use whipped cream, to round up both the creaminess and sweetness we want for this delicious dessert.