Chocolate Demi-Delights

Last week I challenged myself to be inspired by the French and make more individual desserts. Well, voila! Here’s my idea: take a fabulous chocolate mousse recipe, some demi-cupcakes, ganache, and nuts. I give you: Demi-Delights.

This isn’t so much a recipe as an idea that you can run with. You can use cookies, cake, torte, maybe even pie crust? And top it with a dallop of chocolate mousse, ganache or caramel, and something crunchy. Be creative! Here I used chocolate ganache and caramel, but some marshmallow topping with graham cracker bits would be delicious too. With the ingredients in your fridge you can put together something tiny and delicious to eat or share with some friends!

How to Impress People with Chocolate

I lived in a dorm during my first year of college. I had a roommate who I had never met before, and after only one week of living with me she had figured out that I have a chocolate problem. Was she a good detective? Absolutely not. She knew after I hung off the side of my bunk bed to get chocolate from my desk because I was too lazy to get down.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I have spent lots of time thinking about chocolate, baking with chocolate, and eating chocolate, so I have devised a killer yet easy Chocolate Mousse recipe. This can be used not only to fill delicious cakes for a chocolate explosion, but also to eat with a spoon on movie night, or even impress people with! Yes, I said impress people. There are only 2 ways that you can mess up this recipe, and I’m not going to let you, so people will be really impressed with your restaurant-quality mousse.

What you need:

• 1-2 cups Chocolate: use a variety! Just be careful not to use just bittersweet or unsweetened.
• 21/4 cups Heavy Cream: Or whipping cream, they’re the same thing actually.
• 2-3 Egg whites: Depending on how much mousse you need/want.
• Flavoring: Be creative! Add in about a teaspoon of whatever you choose, you can try mint, coffee (you can use extract or instant coffee powder), vanilla, Kahlua, hazelnut….
• 1/4 Granulated Sugar

Get in there and make it!

1. Gather all of the ingredients listed above. For materials you’ll need a hand or standing mixer, assorted bowls, and some nice spatulas.
2. Make the ganache! Mousse is a combination of three things: ganache, whipped cream, and meringue. To make ganache, put your chocolate, flavoring, and cream into a medium saucepan. Then put over medium/low heat (you can crank it up to medium for a bit if you need to, just keep an eye on it if you do) and stir until all of the chocolate melts. Remove it from heat and set it aside. And just because I know you will, feel free to taste that deliciousness.
3. Whip those eggs! You’re going to want that mixer for this unless you don’t want to be using your arm for another week. Your call. If you’re using a standing mixer, be ready to break out your whisk attachment. Separate the eggs, and whip only the egg whites. Do not let ANY yoke, shell, or anything else get into that bowl! Egg whites are snobs and won’t whip up if anything else is in the bowl. Set your mixer or your hand mixer and whip them until they are fluffed up and white, then add in the sugar and mix just a little more. Now you have meringue, congrats!
4. Last part: the whipped cream. Pour 2 cups into a bowl and whip the cream until its fluffy goodness (use the whisk attachment for this too).
5. Put it all together. Put about 1/3 of your meringue and 1/3 of your whipped cream in a large bowl. Get that spatula ready and spoon a little bit of your ganache in there, and get folding. Not the laundry kind; folding here means sweeping the spatula around the side of the bowl and under your fluffy stuff. Keep going until there are no more white streaks, then add more chocolate, whipped cream, and meringue until you are out of the cream and meringue. You may have extra chocolate, don’t worry about it. It’s better to have some extra chocolate in the house than to weigh down your beautiful mousse!
6. Make it pretty, or scarf it down. At this point you are now a successful mousse-maker. Whoo! Celebrate by eating the whole bowl (I may or may not have done this, you’ll never know), or put it in pretty dishes, or in a cake, and refrigerate.

Possible Problems:

1. Overcooking the chocolate.

This can happen if you leave the chocolate in the saucepan for too long, it will stick to the bottom of it and smell kind of crispy. Just keep the chocolate, cream, and flavoring in the saucepan until all of the chocolate is fully melted, then set it aside. It’s usually a good idea to chop the chocolate in some way so that you’re not trying to melt huge chunks, because who has time for that?

2. Flopping your fluffy stuff.

The key to fluffy mousse is fluffy stuff! That’s your whipped cream and your meringue (transformed egg whites). When you start combining everything, make sure that you’re folding and not stirring. Stirring is more of a circular motion that is going to cut up all the beautiful air bubbles and volume that we got into the cream. Be gentle!

If you get so excited about making mousse and you accidentally stir it into a goopy mess, don’t sweat! Throw it in the fridge for a bit and make up some more meringue or whipped cream and fold it back in, then refrigerate again until it sets.