Chocolate Mousse — Safer By This

Chocolate mousse is one of the desserts I always have in my back pocket for a dinner party, because it really only needs things you likely already have in the kitchen, it comes together super quickly, and it can look super impressive.

Eggs, Chocolate, Butter, and Sugar.

These four things are all you need.

Normally I’d use granulated sugar, but all I had was some brown sugar so I substituted that. It’s one of the things that is so great about this recipe, you can sorted of go with the flow.

Today I wasn’t making Mousse for a dinner party, I just felt like making a treat and I wanted to bring something to my neighbours for taking care of Tiny Dog last week. So I halved my normal recipe (which fills 6 4oz Ramekins) so I used 100g of dark chocolate, 3 eggs, 3 tbsp of unsalted butter, and 2tbs of brown sugar.

I started by heating the chocolate, chopped into rough pieces, and the butter into a bowl on top of simmer water.

You can use whatever chocolate you like and the recipe stays pretty much the same. If you’re using a milk chocolate I would use less sugar. I’ve also made this with a chili chocolate bar, which was amazing.

While it slowly heated up I separated the eggs, and put the yolks and a couple tablespoons of sugar into the electric mixer beating them until they turned a super light yellow colour.

Once the chocolate and butter melted into a smooth mixture, take it off the heat. I added a little of the warm chocolate to the egg yolk mixture to temper it, then added it all back into the chocolate.

Then I cleaned and dried the mixing bow and mixer attachment and beat the egg whites to stiff peaks.

Then gently fold the whites into the chocolate mixture 1/3 at a time, trying to keep as much of the volume in it as possible.

Then I filled a piping bag and pulled out some small jars.

The other thing I love about chocolate mousse is how customizable it is. So in the three different jars I made three slightly different versions.

The first one I filled with just the chocolate mousse.

The second I chopped some candied ginger and put a layer into the bottom of the jar, then filled with mousse and topped with a little more candied ginger.

For the third I zested and supremed a blood orange, and layer orange supremes on the bottom then added mousse half way, added some more orange supremes, then topped with the mousse.

All three went back into the fridge to set up.

Once they were ready I whipped up some heavy cream. I topped the plain chocolate with dollop of plain whipped cream and some chocolate shavings. I took a third of the whipped cream, added a small splash of ginger simple syrup, put it onto the chocolate ginger mousse and topped it with another piece of candied ginger. I took the last third, added about a tsp of the orange zest and dolloped it on top of the blood orange version.

Once I delivered the deserts, I poured the last of the chianti from Saturday’s dinner into a glass and enjoyed my mousse.