Deliciously Simple and Easy Chocolate Mousse Recipe

Required Ingredients

1 Pint Heavy Whipping Cream
10-12 oz Bittersweet Chocolate (60-63% cocoa will do nicely)

I have seen chocolate mousse recipes which add many different ingredients to the cream and chocolate.  All of these ingredients are unnecessary.  However you should experiment with different additions.  One time I added a strawberry sauce to the chocolate mousse to find a texture disaster.  The goal was to create a nice layer of strawberry flavor inside of the mousse.  The result was that the strawberry sauce was letting the air out of the whipping cream, and I ended up with more of a chocolate-strawberry soup.  I think vanilla could be a nice addition to the mousse.

Suggested Hardware

Electric Mixer, we currently use a Kitchen Aid stand mixer that I got my wife for Christmas in 2004.  This is the best gift that I ever got for my wife, since we use it for chocolate mousse, cookies, and bread dough.

Directions

1. Mix chilled whipping cream at medium speed until the cream becomes almost clumpy.  I prefer to mix the cream past the stage of stiff peaks because I can mostly ignore the cream while melting the chocolate.  Since this recipe is about getting easy and delicious chocolate mousse that will impress your guests, I wouldn’t worry about over whipping the cream.


This is what I want my whipped cream to look like.

2. Chop the chocolate into the smallest pieces that you can manage.  The smaller the pieces are, the lower the total temperature will have to be to melt all of the chocolate.  In a pinch I once used a bag of 12 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of the finely chopped bittersweet chocolate.  The end result was still very good, but it was more difficult to deal with.  I have also made this with 60% Chocolate chips from Ghirardelli, don’t sweat over the price I bought a 3-pound bag at Sam’s Club for just over $7.
3. Utilizing a double-boiler system, melt the chocolate over simmering water.  Chocolate can be temperamental at times, and the use of a double-boiler will allow you to melt the chocolate in a consistent manner.  When I used the bag of chocolate chips, the chocolate did not melt into a very smooth texture.  It just did not work as well as the cut up 10 pound chocolate bar that I normally use.
4. Pour the melted chocolate into the whipped cream and fold in the chocolate into the whipped cream.  Do as little mixing of the chocolate mousse as you can possibly stand to do.  Your electric mixer went through a lot of effort to add air to the cream that you just whipped up.  Do not ruin the efforts of your mixer by letting all of the air out when combining the whipped cream and melted chocolate.
5. Chill for at least an hour.  It will be one of the most difficult hours that you will wait, but you will be rewarded heavily for your patience.

Serving Suggestions

While everybody I have ever served this easy to make chocolate mousse to has loved it, there is a difference of opinion on what garnishment should be used to serve it with.  These are the most popular ways we have cut the richness of the chocolate flavor of this mousse down…

My Favorite:  Fresh Raspberries.  I do not like fresh raspberries by themselves.  I find their flavor too overpowering.  What better combination could there exist than the overpowering flavor of a raspberry and the richness of this chocolate mousse?

My Wife’s Favorite:  Raspberry Sauce. This sauce is easy to make also, just add sugar to some fresh raspberries and let them sit aside for awhile.  The hydroscopic nature of the sugar will begin to pull the water out of the raspberries.  After the sugar and raspberries have become good friends, mash the raspberries and you have a nice fruity sauce to serve with the chocolate mousse.

Either of these choices also works well with strawberries.  I imagine any berry would work as a good garnish, except for possibly blueberries.

How This Recipe Came To Be

One night as I was starting to make dinner, my wife, Erin said that she wanted to have a treat after dinner.  Of course our two children, who at the time were 3 years old and 1.5 years old, got very excited at this prospect.  We did not have anything in the house that really qualified as a treat.  I knew that Erin wanted to go out and get ice cream after dinner.  Being opposed to over paying for things and desiring to stay home, I was determined to create another solution.  Looking in the fridge, I saw a half full carton of heavy whipping cream left over from making dinner the night before.  Then the light bulb came on…  I love chocolate mousse!  Fortunately we typically have an overabundance of cooking chocolate around the house.  Knowing that at its core, chocolate mousse is just whipped cream combined with chocolate, I went to work.

What a great night for our family.  We discovered a delicious and easy dessert that we all love.  Since, we often have the bittersweet baking chocolate on hand; all we need to do to have our dessert is to pick up a pint of heavy whipping cream from the grocery store.

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Tagged as: chocolate, dessert, foodie, mousse, simple recipes