mousse au chocolat à l'Anglaise voluptueuse

Chocolate mousse in the style of a voluptuous Englishwoman!

This is the Englishwoman in question: the sumptuous Nigella Lawson:

Her cooking site is here. She's a big TV personality, too, though I've never had the chance to see her in action. My buddy Mike gave me her cookbook, Nigella Bites, and I plan to do a good bit of foodblogging based on her recipes over the course of this year.

I mentioned earlier that Nigella's site had a radical recipe for egg-less chocolate mousse. The very idea boggles the mind: eggs are essential for a good mousse. Nigella's way around this little problem is... marshmallows.

"Preposterous!" I hear you belch. And I'd agree!

Nigella knows this is cheating, but having read her cookbook all the way through now, I can tell you that she likes tweaking snobbish sensibilities, finding clever ways to get high-end results through low-end ingredients. Nigella isn't afraid to point out that she's a mom and therefore always looking for shortcuts.

The idea that you can make a chocolate mousse without any eggs was so intriguing, so maddening, that I had to know whether this recipe would work. I screwed up my courage and headed out for Hannam Market despite the cold, risking death (for your sake, asshole!), and decided to grab both dinner ingredients and the evil reagents needed to make Nigella's unique chocolate mousse:

1. chocolate (She doesn't specify whether it should be sweetened or unsweetened, but she does say it should be over "70% cocoa solids." I have no clue what this actually means. When I got to Hannam Market, I bought Korean chocolate chips, which came in a clear plastic bag.)

2. marshmallows (Good Christ, woman! marshmallows!!)

3. unsalted butter (I had to settle for lightly salted)

4. hot water (I simply used what I had at home)

5. a tub of "double cream" (I bought whipping cream, which is likely too thick)

6. vanilla extract (The store had only artificial vanilla, so I bought that.)

You see above that I compromised on most of the ingredients, except the water and marshmallows. Even the marshmallows were problematic: Hannam Market sells a Philippine brand of multicolored marshmallows.

The ingredients:



You're then supposed to put the marshmallows, chocolate, butter, and water together in a saucepan. The water should be boiling when it goes in-- I suppose this is to produce a sort of quick-melting, double boiler effect: a faster melt in the pan, less risk of burning the pan's bottom as you stir constantly. Sure enough, over the next few minutes, as I stirred, the marshmallows began to melt and the whole thing began to go brown:



The stirring occupied my attention. Once the whole mixture became a goopy brown mass (this should all be done on very low heat), I next turned to the heavy cream and vanilla, mixing the two thoroughly:



And then, per the good lady's instructions, I added the cream/vanilla mix to the chocolate and folded them together:



The astute cook will note that the above breaks another cardinal rule of mixing: liquid ingredients to be blended together should be about the same temperature at the moment of mixing. The cream/vanilla mixture was substantially cooler than the still-bubbling chocolate/marshmallow mixture. Erring on the side of caution, I returned the whole thing to the burner, just for a few seconds, and stirred until I was confident that a decent mix had taken place.

After that, I took the whole mess off the heat, found some glasses, and poured my version of Nigella's recipe into each of them:



In the meantime, I took the rest of the whipping cream and, well, whipped its ass:



I let the cups cool for about 30 minutes, then covered them with plastic wrap:



According to the master, they're supposed to chill for three hours. As I write this, it's been two hours, so I don't know what the mousse tastes like yet. I'm curious to see whether it properly simulates the consistency of real chocolate mousse, and whether the taste comes anywhere near the real thing. The "no eggs" business worries me, because it's the eggs that make true mousse au chocolat worthwhile.

If Nigella's recipe works, though, then I've discovered a way around the salmonella problem, and will now be able to prepare a decent dessert for whatever guests I entertain.

Stay tuned. More photos to come, and a description of the mousse's taste.


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