Chocolate Coffee Mousse recipe

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 23 February 2011 in cooking, Featured, recipes | 5 comments

I stumbled upon this recipe a little while ago and it’s become a favourite in the Peach household – not only is it one of the nicest, richest desserts I’ve ever eaten, it both uses up eggs (a good thing!) and is really pretty easy & quick to make as well.

It’s easy because it cheats by starting with ready-made chocolate. I’ve tried making it with both fancy 70% chocolate and cheaper plain stuff (I mean really cheap plain stuff – Netto, two 200g bars for £1.50) – there is a difference, the former was obviously a lot stronger and richer, but you know what? the cheaper stuff did pretty well too. The intense strong chocolate is nice but can be a bit overwhelming – I’d certainly make it again with the cheaper stuff, especially if the people eating it weren’t major dark chocolate fans.

Regarding the coffee, John is a coffee snob so we have very good beans in the house pretty much all the time and he makes it using an Aeropress which apparently removes a lot of the bitterness (I don’t like to drink coffee but I like it as a flavour in cakes & desserts). Since it was being mixed with other things, he didn’t use his super expensive stuff but used a blend of “old” beans (admittedly no more than a few weeks old) to make the espresso. I dare say the fact it was good coffee to start with added to the flavour of the finished dessert.

Aside from that though, eggs is eggs, a little sugar is a little sugar. If the eggs are homegrown (as ours are), the only real cost is the chocolate, with an extra 20p or so for the fancy-smancy coffee. For a super rich dessert for four, I think it’s pretty reasonable.