Mousse!

So we celebrated Vietnamese New Years this past weekend and of course our parties never disappoint. Even though guys can't get pregnant, I get a food baby from eating so much. I also made all my aunts fortune cookies with a little wish for the new year, and man my fingers were on fire. In the bad way! I have a low tolerance for heat so I was juggling the fortune cookie trying to fold it. Not cool. But they did turn out nicely! Let me know if you want the recipe. Anyhow, I didn't really know what to make for this year's party but I knew there wasn't going to be a lot of dessert so I originally intended to make a pastry of some sort...maybe even a cake. Buuuut I got super lazy and then I had a craving for mousse so I decided to make mousse! tada!
Alright alright I cheated with the chocolate shells. I was going to make them from scratch but a pack of 18 was on sale at Ralph's for get this....$0.49!!! FREAKIN AMAZING!!!!!!!!! But if I really wanted to I could've made them from scratch. I promise! I have a tempering machine at my disposal so now I can play guitar hero while my chocolate melts...it's like that roasting oven infomercial I used to watch where every other line is, "SET IT AND FORGET IT!" kinda like that... Anyhow this is the tempering machine that
I used to make chocolate. This is what I made for Christmas. Pretty neato! Everyone thought I bought them because the chocolates were so glossy and they had a nice design on them. You can buy the transfers online too they're pretty cheap at about $6 for a roll.















Sooo back to making mousse. The recipe I used was pretty simple and the result was almost like how I imagined it. If I were going to remake it, I would have probably whipped the cream more, but that's about it. Here's the basic ingredients you'll need:

2 cups heavy cream
1 cup bar chocolate
2 drops coffee extract

First you want to break up your chocolate into small pieces about the size of pennies. They don't have to be perfect; I just chopped mine up quickly and left them in a medium sized bowl. After you do this, boil 1/2 cup of whipped cream, and then pour this onto your chocolate mixture. Add 2 drops of coffee extract to the mixture. Let this stand for a couple minutes and then slowly stir to make sure the chocolate is melted and the coffee gets incorporated. This works with white chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, it's just preference. In another medium sized bowl, start whipping the remaining 1 1/2 cups of whipping cream until soft peaks form.
Now just fold this into your chocolate mixture and you're pretty much done! I decided to pipe the mousse into the chocolate cups because it would've looked really ugly/sloppy if I just spooned it.



Since there was extra whipping cream in the fridge, I decided to make a little bit of white chocolate mousse and green tea mousse using matcha powder. You can decorate these however you want, but I piped the chocolate mousse on the bottom layer, and then piped some white chocolate mousse on top, some toffee bits, a slivered almond, and finishing it off with a nice chocolate drizzle. So how'd I do?