Avocado Chocolate Mousse: A Five-Ingredient Blender Dessert

Can you make chocolate mousse out of avocados? You can, and it is one of Becca’s personal favorites. Five ingredients go into a blender, and a few minutes later you have a thick, rich chocolate dessert that happens to be vegan, paleo-friendly, gluten-free and dairy-free.

This video is not a polished food shoot. It is our real kitchen, with two toddlers very much involved, and you can hear it. Becca would be the first to say she does not make highly curated food videos and her recipes are not fancy. What she does care about, a lot, is feeding our family whole foods as often as possible. This one fits the bill.

What you need

The recipe makes four servings.

• 3 medium avocados
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• About 2/3 cup coconut milk, adjusted for the texture you like

How to make it

Put everything in a blender and blend until it is completely smooth. That is genuinely the whole method. Start with a little less coconut milk than the full amount and add more until it reaches the texture you want: less for a dense, pudding-like mousse, more for something softer and silkier.

It keeps well in the fridge for one to two days, so it is easy to make ahead.

Why avocado works in a dessert

A ripe avocado is rich in oil (Rudolph Hass prized his namesake fruit for its 18% oil content) and has very little flavor of its own once it is up against cocoa and maple. It does the job that cream or butter would do in a traditional mousse, which is why the result is rich rather than tasting like guacamole. The one thing that matters is ripeness: the fruit needs to yield to gentle pressure. An underripe avocado will leave the mousse grainy and a little grassy.

If you like this idea, Becca has two more avocado desserts on the site. Her avocado chia seed pudding is a filling snack, and the carob chia seed pudding swaps chocolate for carob if you want to skip the caffeine.

Cooking with little helpers

A blender recipe is about as toddler-friendly as cooking gets. Scooping avocado, dumping in the cocoa, pressing the button — there are jobs for small hands, and the mess stays mostly in one place. It will not look like a magazine photo when they are done, and that is fine.

Three medium avocados is the base of this recipe, and our 4lb Hass box covers a batch with fruit to spare. It ships free when we are picking, and between harvests the waitlist on the page will tell you when fruit is back. A stainless steel avocado scoop makes quick work of the prep. Until the trees are picking again, the avocado scoop, the Hawaiian shirt and our hats ship year-round.

Try this: Use a properly ripe avocado. With five ingredients there is nothing for an underripe one to hide behind.

This post is part of our guide to choosing, ripening and using avocados.