The Results - Spiced Chocolate Mousse

Sunday was a beautifully warm day, and this dessert topped the day off perfectly. Although, everyone was a little too full from the bbq, but the spiciness and lightness of the mousse went down well.

So here is the picture of the great achievement.....

I managed to stuff this recipe up, or so I thought. I used 70% dark chocolate as apposed to the 54% cocoa chocolate suggested in the recipe. This isn’t a problem, I like the bitterness and intenseness of the dark chocolate, but its up to the individual. I suggest tasting the mixture before adding the cream, if its not sweet enough, add a little castor sugar. If you use the 54% cocoa chocolate, this should be sweet enough.

My main problem was when I added the egg yolks to the melted chocolate. You are "supposed" to wait until the chocolate is cooled right down, so when you add the egg yolks you don't scramble them. Because I am so impatient and I wanted to eat the mousse as quickly as possible, I added the eggs when the chocolate was still too warm. And of course I ended up with something that looked alot more like fudge, rather than the glossy chocolate mixture I was expecting. So my first thought was, "stuff it, start again and turn this stuff into some awesome chocolate fudge brownies". So I took my egg whites (that were at room temperature, really important because if they are at room temperature they become really fluffy and keep more air in them), gave them a bit of a beat so they were foamy and added them to the chocolate/cooked egg yolk mixture. I noticed that the mixture was a bit lumpy so I gave it a really good beat, as I was beating the eggs I noticed that they were getting really fluffy and were holding alot of air. So I kept beating until I got a very moussy consistency. Some how I had managed to rescue the whole thing. Then I added my cream and folded the whole lot together.

The end result was really yummy. Yes, if I had started again I would have gotten a much more airy mousse, but my version tasted so good that I don’t care. So if you manage to cook your egg yolks like me, don’t worry, just add the eggwhites (only slightly beaten) to the mixture and continue from there. It worked a treat for me. I will definitely be doing this recipe again, but maybe next time I will try nutmeg only.....just to spice things up a little.