Chocolate Mousse!!!!
So we ended up having an incredibly late night on Friday round C and K’s (the ones with the boat – keep up), drinking vast amounts of champagne and Chablis and tucking into a takeaway Chinese. I was completely toasted and woke up the next day at midday with a hammerdrill playing havoc with the inside of my head (I know, I know – self to blame). Happily, I saw both C and K down the shop later and they both looked like crap too.
Hubby was back to work yesterday, which meant that the fellas and I got to have pasta – woohoo! We rounded it off with a celebratory chocolate mousse. What? Surely there’s no carbs in chocolate mousse is there?
Here goes, then:
Half a large bar (about 100 – 150g) of dark chocolate, snapped into squares (we used Bournville and it was fab)
4 fl oz double cream
2 eggs, separated
Another 4 fl oz double cream
So put your first 4 fl oz cream in a saucepan and heat it up – it doesn’t matter if it boils but don’t let it reduce at all. Take it off the heat and add your chocolate, stirring to melt it all in. Let it cool down to finger-dipping temp (you know you want to keep testing it). Meanwhile, separate the two eggs and whisk the whites until they’re at the stiff peak stage (cue stupid ‘holding the bowl over someone’s head’ routine). When the cream and chocolate mixture is cool enough not to make scrambled eggs, beat in the two egg yolks, then fold in the egg whites gently.
Put into cups or glasses or something (small portions here, people) and put in the fridge. Finally, if you’re at English Towers, where everyone feels the need to ponce about with a perfectly decent recipe, you need to whisk a second amount of cream until it’s fluffy and spoon it on top of the mousse the add grated chocolate so it looks like a cappuccino. Or even fold it gently through so it looks all marbly (we did this at the table making ooh and aah noises, but we don’t get out much).
This is such a good fun recipe to make with kids. You can slosh a bit of alcohol in the saucepan with the cream and chocolate – dare I suggest Cointreau or Grand Marnier – or a teeny cup of strong espresso. You can even make a second quantity with white chocolate and layer them up in a wine glass, or maybe pipe it onto little shortcake biscuits for a party. Did somebody say party…?
Having no kids of my own, I tried to recreate this scene when I was looking after McBouncy’s youngsters once. Somehow, a plastic spatula managed to get melted into the chocolate and evenly distributed throughout the buns. And we were only making easy-peasy Rice Crispie buns, too!
We ate them anyway, carefully spitting out bits of plastic…
Mum used to make one with a splash of rum in it – fond memories…
Love the new look of your blog btw