Chocolate Mousse

We made our first chocolate mousse dessert, and it counts towards a contest! Thomas Allen & Son Ltd. is challenging Canadian home chefs and bloggers to create recipes from Jacques Pépin's newest cookbook, Essential Pepin. I thought I would give it a try for my chance to win a copy of the cookbook.

One could make an entire Pépin meal from the three recipes provided:

a) Composed salad of greens, goat cheese, and caramelized pecans

b) Chicken in tarragon sauce

c) Chocolate mousse

Each one that you make would count as an entry. The salad and chicken was tempting, but I went for the dessert!

The recipe is pretty simple, calling for sugar, egg yolks, bittersweet/semisweet chocolate, heavy cream, and cognac/dark rum/Grand Marnier. I was probably over confident, because this dessert took us longer than I thought!

First of all, I bought table cream from Shopper's by accident. My mousse-making partner and I figured something was wrong when it wouldn't form soft peaks after intensive whipping. So we had to put our chocolate and egg yolk mixture aside and go to the supermarket.

No Frills was sold out of heavy cream! How about Wal-Mart? Crap, it wasn't a Superstore with the fridge aisles. Even our last hope, a Daisy Mart convenience store, no luck. So we went home and debated risking the mousse by using the bubbly table cream. Was everyone making desserts with heavy cream this weekend?

Then we received good news, Howard found some and brought over just enough for the recipe! Hooray, we could continue...

Unfortunately, our chocolate mixture had gotten hard by the time we finally had soft peaks from our cream. The chocolate had probably seized and started to break down. In which Pépin suggests to "immediately stir in 1 to 2 tablespoons of the whipped cream to smooth out the mixture."

Oh crap again. We didn't get a chance to do that "immediately" because we didn't have whipped cream at that time.

We warmed it up again and tried our best to salvage it. Then we folded in the whipped cream until it was as smooth as it could get.

Then, we funneled the mixture into four cups and one take-out container for my mousse-making partner to take some home (it made six servings - perfect). We didn't end up chilling it for two hours because we were keen on decorating them before the sun went down.

For two of the glasses, we piped little poofs on top of the already firmed mousse with the whipped cream we set aside. Then sprinkled some cinnamon on it. For the other two, we added a layer of milk chocolate Crispearls and then piped on whipped cream. Yum!

And for some odd reason, we had it in our heads that we were making chocolate pudding that day. Some weird switch must have happened in my mind, so when it didn't turn out jiggly, we thought we made it wrong. But upon checking the recipe title, we realized that it was correct! What a day of ups and downs!

Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year!

It is the year of the ox! We've gotten our new calendars, baskets of mandarin oranges, red pockets, new year's cake, turnip cakes, and various new year treats. We saw these Clementine Cakes on flagrante delicia earlier this month and we knew we would want to try them. Since mandarin oranges are very popular during Chinese New Year, we adapted her recipe to make Mandarin Orange Cupcakes! They were topped with whipped cream and decorated with fondant.


Mandarin Orange Cupcakes
Adapted from flagrante delicia

4 separated eggs
250 g of sugar
150 g of cake flour
70 ml of mandarin orange juice

1. Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
   
2. Mix the egg yolks with sugar.
3. Add in whisked egg whites, the flour and the juice.
4. Pour batter into cupcake liners and bake for 20-25 minutes.
   

Going clockwise from top left: Separated egg yolks, Mandarin oranges, Whipped cream splatter in mixing bowl, and Mandarin orange cupcake.

The cupcakes were very dense and we are thinking we should have added a leavening agent. Or the egg whites were not stiff enough? The mandarin orange juice left a bitter citrus aftertaste, which helped even out how sweet the cupcakes were. The best part of these cupcakes were the light sugar coating on top - like creme brulee! The tops of the cupcakes were brown with caramelized sugar.

Some people like having this word upside down to symbolize the arrival of luck, happiness, and prosperity. Initially, I was going to write the word with edible food markers, but my dad told me to cut the word out from fondant. Then he said I should make it look like Chinese calligraphy. Well, I took on the challenge and yeahh it looks good!

Chinese gold ingot made from fondant. This symbolizes wealth and money.

Red and gold Chinese lantern made from fondant. Two very lucky colours!

Happy Chinese New Year to you all!