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Chocolate Mousse, No Cheats

Chocolate mousse is fucking awesome, and even if dinner for your friends is roasted chicken and two veg, you can class up the whole affair by finishing with this. It is also a very romantic dish, especially when you rub it all over your… ahem.. nevermind. As usual, read the whole thing first, and set your game plan in order.

You will need

Equipment

  • 3 stainless steel bowls, standard type, about 12inches diameter, with a depth of 5 inches, or whatever you have.
  • A pot about 1/2 the diameter of one of the bowls
  • A hand mixer, or a whisk (one of those french things that looks like a fucked up antenna) and a lot of patience.
  • 4 martini glasses or similar elegant presentation vessels.

Ingredients

  • 4oz (110g) decent chocolate, semi sweet, or bitter sweet. The only things on the ingredient list should be cocoa solids, cocoa butter, sugar, and maybe some lecethin and preservatives.
  • 2 tbsp unsalted butter, fuck you if you use margarine and the whole thing goes haywire.
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/8 tsp cream of tartar, found in the baking section of the grocery store.
  • 2 tbsp sugar, and 1 tbsp sugar (department of redundancy department strikes again)
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1/2 cup heavy(whipping) cream.

Pre Show
If the chocolate is in big chunks, put it in a plastic bag and bash the fuck out of it. If it is already in chips, they had better not be some no name brand shit.
Make a double boiler(cook lingo for indirect heat) by putting about 2 inches of water into the pot and bringing it to a boil, then turning it down again so it is hot but not boiling, if it is boiling you will get hard bits in your chocolate as you melt it.
Separate the eggs, do this by cracking the egg into your hand with the yolk intact, and allowing the clear part to run through your fingers into one of the bowls, save the yolks for throwing at traffic.

The show

This is a pretty tight operation, so make sure you have about 20 minutes to devote to it. Have all the ingredients and the hand mixer ready, as well as a rubber spatula

Melt the chocolate and butter together in a bowl set on top of the hot water, be patient, and don’t be tempted to turn the heat up. Stir constantly until the chocolate and butter are liquid and mixed well. Take the mixture off the heat and proceed.

Whip the egg whites, cream of tartar, and the 2 tbsp sugar in the second bowl until they form soft peaks. If you are using a hand mixer this is about 2.5 minutes, if you are using a whisk(god help you) about 7, with good effort. Soft peaks mean, the mixture is white, and when you pull the beater out, the resulting “peak” slumps a little.

Whip the cream, the other tsp of sugar, and the vanilla in the third bowl to the soft peak stage as well, if you are using a whisk, put the egg bowl in the fridge so as it does not degrade.

Now comes the tricky bit, add a small amount of the melted chocolate and butter and stir it in GENTLY, you went to a lot of trouble for those bubbles, don’t break them. Once a small amount of the chocolate has been introduced to the eggs, raising their temperature slightly, the eggs are ‘tempered’. Now pour that into the bowl with the melted chocolate and butter(scrape out the bowl). Fold the two together. Folding, means you are taking the rubber spatula, moving it down the side of the bowl to the bottom, and then back up through the middle, each time you do this, rotate the bowl 1/8 turn in the political direction of your choice, conservatives to the right, liberals to the left. (communists do not eat chocolate as it offends their principals, but they are excellent bakers)

When the mixture is mostly brown(like my neighborhood), fold in the whipped cream, and continue folding and thinking about politics until the mix is uniform in color, and not a second more. The object is to retain as many of the bubbles in the whipping cream and beaten eggs as possible, be gentle and patient, much as DFG would be with a small child he intends to molest later.

Pour the mix into the martini glasses and set it in the fridge to set for at least an hour. Chocolate fucking nirvana. Garnish with a splash of your favorite liquor, and some whipped cream.

C/O
“must write guide, bzzzzzz, publish or perish, bzzzzzz”

Discuss http://www.totse.info/bbs/showthread.php/13911-Chocolate-mousse-no-cheats.

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