Karen
So. I’ve been a Happy Eggs Taste Maker for a few months now and I am genuinely happy to be an advocate of eggs that come from happy hens. You may, however, have noticed (but probably haven’t) that I haven’t posted much in the way of recipes. Today I’m going to demonstrate why.
Last month, The Happy Egg Co. sent me a really lovely cook book full of chocolate based recipes. Now, I do love cooking but my forte really lies with savoury food. Desserts certainly aren’t my strong point. Why just last week I used prepared fruit and ready rolled pastry to make a couple of pies – and still managed to ruin them!
Eric Lanlard is also known as ‘Cake Boy’ which is the name of his Shop, and you might have seen him on the telly because he’s had his own shows: Glamous Puds and Baking Mad.
Anyway, back to my kitchen, erm, ‘skills’. I did agree to be a Taste Maker and part of that is to show you, my poor unsuspecting reader, all of the wonderful things you can make (and I can ruin) with Happy Eggs. So I chose what I considered to be one of the easiest recipes in the book, made sure I had all of the ingredients and set about making…
… French Bistro Chocolate Mousse.
All I needed to do was melt some chocolate, chuck in a couple of eggs, whisk until my arm fell off and then do something called folding. Easy, yeah?
Firstly, can I just say that I have a GCSE in Food Technology, so since I’m something of an *ahem* expert – you’d think separating a couple of eggs would be easy. I suppose it would for someone with common sense, but apparently that left me when I opened the egg box.
Two successful – and 4 failed – attempts later I finally had my egg whites. So I whisked like my life depended on it until I had stiff peaks … make of that what you will.
I smugly melted my chocolate over some boiling water (taking care not to let the bowl touch the water and therefore avoiding bitter chocolate – I read that somewhere) and followed the rest of the instructions to the letter. Very pleased with myself, I left my mousse in the fridge and went about my day.
Six hours later I proudly served the mousse up into dishes for myself and the kids but before handing theirs over I licked my spoon.
That’s when I realised something was very wrong with my mousse.
It tasted like extra dark, gooey chocolate – and not in a good way! Surely the French don’t eat this in their bistros, I thought. It’s vile!
I’d followed the recipe exactly – how could this happen. It’s just a bloody mousse for goodness sake, how can I mess up a mousse?!
I’ll tell you how.
You know when a recipe calls for 6 egg whites? Well, you need to add SIX EGG WHITES. Not two. Two will give you something that resembles chocolate putty. Two egg whites will make your children ask why you’re shouting at a book. You need to add six of those bad boys. Two will leave you counting missing eggs from the box and discovering that you were so pleased with your little egg-separating self on the final two eggs you forgot to replace the four you so majorly messed up. Reading the recipe is a great idea. Following it properly is better still.
So that’s what I did, the following day. I used six egg whites (and some other stuff) to make a rich, delicious, quite perfect French Bistro Chocolate Mousse.
