Chocolate Panna Cotta

Chocolate Panna Cotta, it's creamy and smooth with a rich chocolate flavour. Easy to whip up then left to chill in the fridge, it's the solid make-ahead dessert for dinner parties, weekends and special occasions.

Panna Cotta is a traditional Italian dessert that means cooked cream. It's one of the simplest desserts you can make and you can change it up with so many different flavours such as classic vanilla, lemon, strawberry and of course chocolate!

What Chocolate To Use?

Dark chocolate is our favourite type of chocolate to use when making desserts. This Panna Cotta is made with sugar, vanilla, cream and milk so dark chocolate is suited to this recipe, we recommend using at least 70% cacao. Milk chocolate would make this dessert much sweeter and would lack the intense chocolate flavour this dessert has.

Adding chocolate to the panna cotta gives it almost a mousse-like texture, it's smooth and creamy and slightly fluffy. It's extremely good and a great, light dessert for after dinner.

How To Make Chocolate Panna Cotta – Step By Step

First, add the gelatine leaves to a bowl of cold water and let it sit for 10 minutes until soft.

Add the cream, milk, sugar to the sauce pan. Scrape the vanilla seeds from inside the pod and add the vanilla to a saucepan on medium/low heat. Heat the mixture until the sugar has dissolved. Bring the milk and cream to a simmer then turn off the heat.

Tip: Place your used vanilla pod in a jar of sugar, this will add a lovely vanilla flavour to the sugar that can be used when baking.

Add the finely chopped chocolate to the milk and cream and stir slowly until the chocolate has completely melted (photos 1-5)

Squeeze the gelatine to remove as much water as possible then add it to the hot cream and chocolate. Whisk constantly until the gelatin has melted then set the saucepan aside to cool (photos 6-8).

Once cooled strain the mixture into serving glasses and place in the fridge to set for at least 2-3 hours before serving.

More Italian Desserts To Try

Italian Desserts

Vanilla Panna Cotta (classic recipe)

Italian Desserts

Boozy Bailey's Panna Cotta

Italian Desserts

White Chocolate Panna Cotta

Italian Desserts

Chocolate Semifreddo Recipe

• Orange chocolate cantucci biscuits
• Pandoro Christmas cake with pistachios and white chocolate
• Tiramisu ice cream
• Apple olive oil cake
• Chocolate hazelnut ice cream

Ingredients

Makes 6 people

• 1 1/4 cup (300ml) cream
• 1 1/8 cup (250ml) milk
• 3 leaves gelatine (* see notes for conversion)
• 1 1/2 tbsp (20g) sugar
• 3.5 oz (100g) dark chocolate 70% cacao (, finely chopped (or use dark chocolate chips))
• 1/2 vanilla pod

Method

1. First, add the gelatine leaves to a bowl of cold water and let it sit for 10 minutes until soft.

2. Add the cream, milk, sugar to a saucepan. Scrape the vanilla seeds from the bean/pod and add vanilla to a saucepan on medium/low heat. Heat the mixture until the sugar has dissolved. Bring the milk and cream to a simmer then turn off the heat.

3. Add the finely chopped chocolate to the milk and cream and stir slowly until the chocolate has completely melted.

4. Squeeze the gelatine to remove as much water as possible then add it to the hot cream and chocolate. Whisk constantly until the gelatin has melted then set the saucepan aside to cool.

5. Once cooled strain the mixture into serving glasses and place in the fridge to set for 2-3 hours.

Kitchen notes

• You can substitute 3 gelatine leaves for 1 tbsp of powdered gelatine. Please note we have not tested this recipe with powdered gelatin.