The Perfect Chocolate Mousse Recipe

Photo by Kaffee Meister on Unsplash

“Getting Straight to the Point

During the holiday season I found myself frantic to find some delicious recipe the entire family could enjoy. I would google things like cake, cookies, and even chocolate mousse to come up with some new ideas, but instead of recipes I would find lengthy stories about a person’s first love.

I think we’ve all experienced something similar and it’s all the more annoying when you just want a refresher of a flour to sugar ratio for cookies. That’s why I’m going to be straight to the point with my recipe. No fanfare or lengthy stories of my friend recovering in the hospital. The only fluff you’re going to get in this article is the creamy fluff of a will mixed mousse.

The first step in the recipe is to get cream.

Wait, have you ever wondered why articles are like that in the first place? Why bloggers will serenade you with their poetic prose or season you with spicy stories? Why do they bother creating entire character arcs for each of their lemon muffins? Why does our recipe for banana cream pie involve a heart wrenching story of a woman going it on her own after a messy divorce and raising two kids alone?

The last line actually spawned an entire sub-genre of recipes under the “Sad” tag. These recipes accounted for all of the tears that would end up in your batter and adjusted the salt content accordingly, so you’d still be able to bake delicious treats no matter how much you cried! Suffering does breed innovation after all!

Anyways, there are several reasons for recipes to exist as novellas, but they all amount to the same thing: the hustle. Either your compelling narrative is up there to make your recipe pop up on Google or it is there to protect the recipe as your intellectual property. One can’t copyright the instructions to the perfect pumpkin pie, but they can for the instructions to a gentleman’s heart. Curious that.

These novellas also might exist because the author isn’t a recipe dispenser for your pleasure. They’re an actual person, with hopes and dreams, and those are essential to understanding the essense of what they bake. Anyone can follow your recipe and make chocolate bars, but for them to be Momma’s Chocolate Bars™ you need to know the idea struck during the exhausted fugue state somewhere between picking your kid up from soccer practice and briefly losing them in a gas station.

Sorry, let’s just get to the recipe!

Listing the Recipe

1/2 Cups Chocolate Chips
1/2 Cup Butter (softened)
1 Cup Flour
1 Cup Brown Sugar

This isn’t the recipe for Chocolate Mousse. I’m not sure what combining those things would do. I just wanted to practice how I’d actually write the recipe out. I think there is something very satisfying about lists and numbers, don’t you?

I think it’s also interesting how much baking is a kind of magic. It’s an act of creation, requiring special ingredients and occult instructions. Where if you don’t perform the ritual in just the right way, your dessert is ruined. And in true occult fashion, maybe even your night or your relationship.

This connection has been seen literally, with ingredients like Eye of Newt just being a pseudonym for mustard seed. And I have to wonder if baking has predominantly been labor put on women, how many men see it as simply magic. We would grind flour to dust and sacrifice unborn chickens to create mighty bread golems capable of enchanting an entire village by smell alone. Witches, all of us.

We’d have this book that over the years would grow massive, as women shared recipes between friends and through generations. A cookbook was a spellbook for all intent and purpose. And when we cooked, it wasn’t just an act of creation, but one of devotion. Spending your time laboring over occult rituals to bring joy to those you care about.

I can’t stress this enough, but if someone has ever cooked for you, there is no greater sign of love. And as the days get shorter, as we work more hours for less money, and as we have no energy left to bake ourselves, then this kind of love disappears. It is replaced by something processed to give you the fuel to work another day, but lacking the love to nourish you in the ways food traditionally always has. (That is before freezer and frozen pizzas.) If it’s any consolation, dear reader, our food is at least still warm in temperature.

One aside, while historically this magic has been regulated to women, the men who practice it are enchanters in their own right. I know a man who shares these amazing loafs of bread that he casually throws together like it’s the easiest thing in the world and I don’t think he knows how much of a thirst trap for women that is. And if you’re a man reading this and you want to make yourself more appealing, stop worrying about going to the gym, just learn to bake and clean. You’d be surprised how much women will crave your buns, hun.

Step-by-Step Instructions

This recipe is simple, to the point, and people of any skill level can accomplish it. You’ll produce perfect results every time. Follow these steps for a no effort and delicious culinary confection.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Take out your ingredients, a large mixing bowl, turn your oven off, grab a spatula, and whatever serving dish you’ll store the mousse in.
3. As demonstrated above, the first thing you need to do is make your instructions clear and to the point. I think some people get into the habit of too much information. They can overload their food blog with dozens of pictures showing the minute details of every step. And while you’d think this adds unparalleled certainty, too much information creates its own obfuscation.
4. I wrote an article on how to write the perfect medium article, but not many people read it because it was a twenty minute long! People prefer something in five to seven minutes or less. That’s true of Medium articles and true of recipes too.
5. Remember to hyperlink. The underlining of text with a promise of a helpful link makes people really feel connected to the broader possibility of the web. Each special instruction should include some hyperlink to a YouTube video demonstrating the skill or technique necessary to perform the ritual.
6. End the recipe with some hallmark signature of joy and indicate a person will be loved now that they’ve baked your recipe. This is a spell after all. Nobody wants to make a “Mild Like” potion. They want “Love” or “True Love” or “No Babies”. (Sometimes it’s about the ovens you turn off.)

Now that we have a pretty good indication of step-by-step instruction lists, we’re reading to finally deliver the recipe in the fastest and most succinct possible way. This is the most trimmed my article could be, just so you don’t have to waste time looking for the recipe. And I don’t expect any thanks. I do it for you and I’m glad to do so.

You know…it’s kind of funny. There exists a kind of antagonism these days between readers and recipe hosts. A sort of battle.

The Online Recipe Battles

Let’s be honest, dear reader, you’ve been online before. You didn’t just now download the internet with your AOL disk, then type into Google an inquiry into chocolaty delights as your first act in hyperspace. You didn’t then find thousands of useful prompts with millions of views, skip down to page 55, see my Medium food blog, and hit click.

No, no, you’ve been around the block. We both know that. You’ve swam through thousands of words in search of the perfect cookie ritual and you’ve learned the tricks. You learn to scroll down to the bottom of the page. You learned to hit control-f, type out cup, and hit enter until the secrets of the recipe would reveal themselves.

Maybe you’ve only parlayed into a few blog themed recipe dungeons, escaping with the useful spells to add to your book of baking magic. Maybe you consider yourself a Google-fu master, able to effortlessly transcend the noise and find exactly what you need. Maybe you flounder helplessly through engaging stories, lost forever in sweet words, but an empty mouth.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is the witches don’t take this trespassing lightly. They will not have their spells robbed so flagrantly out from under their noses. And as recipe thefts have increased, so too will recipe securities and curses.

It isn’t so hard to give a list of items and make little tweaks to it. Minus some sugar here, add some butter, increase the temperature — tiny little flaws that are only corrected within the heart of the blog.

And when your ritual fails, when your family leaves you, and your boss fires you for the worst batch of Momma’s Chocolate Bars™ ever baked, you will turn with hate and eyes full of vengeance to Momma. You will lay your misfortune on her blogstep. Cry about the betrayal from the recipe you stole and with the white hot fury fueled purely with indignation of a privileged life — Momma will smack you down.

Oh girl, she will say, didn’t you read my story? Didn’t you find out my recipe had to change to buying half of the ingredients from a gas station? That my original recipe listed was just the base and the story is what made it anything special.

And I know what you’re wondering, what makes this Chocolate Mousse special to me? Are you sure? Don’t you want me to just give you the recipe so you can go on your way? Don’t you just want a simple dessert to make for yourself or your friends?

Oh. I never knew. You actually wanted a story? Okay, sure. I will tell you then!

The Secret to Perfect Chocolate Mousse (Shh!)

First, close your eyes.

Shit, wait…welcome back! Sorry, I didn’t think that one through. You’ll probably need your eyes to read this I guess. So, actually, keep your eyes open. And keep blinking automatically, so your eyes don’t dry out! Okay, let’s start over!

I’m going to tell you one of the most impactful moments of my life and it’s key to understanding the essence of the Mousse. This journey will whisk you back thirty years, when the air was cleaner and just before millions of disks mysteriously appeared in our mail box, promising free hours of internet and nothing in return. A suspiciously free lunch, coming out of nowhere, and dramatically and irreversibly changing the entire course of the world.

Now put yourself in front of a television set. Not modern TV, not even a TV of the 1990s, no, think older. Think a 1970's box style TV encased in wood, like the druids themselves put the shows on for us. Think a TV you could practically smell and each time turning it on was praying to god the Frankenstein’s monster would galvanize to life. And if god wasn’t having it, you’d hit it twice against the side to wake the druid up anyways.

Now on this television you were watching Uncle Buck. You may be wondering how this is related to Chocolate Mousse and I think at this point we’re both well past that. Do you really want a recipe anymore? After all the time we spent together? No, no, obviously not.

Anyways, if you haven’t seen it, it’s about a deadbeat uncle who through dire circumstances has to take care of his brother’s kids for a few weeks. It’s a fish out of water comedy, with all the stylish buffoonery and lovable big lug vibe John Candy always brought to the big screen. To this day, just seeing him in any movie gives me a feeling of warmth and safety, like he really is my uncle, but only exists across cinematic universes, planes, and trains.

While that movie has a number of big hits in the emotional catharsis department, the scene I want you to imagine (eyes open) is a child being scolded by a principal for not taking her academic career seriously enough. The child is something like a 2nd grader and the scene plays out in a traditional setting of parent apologizing for their kid’s behavior.

And while half the scene is making fun of someone’s mole in pretty bad taste, the other half is a defense of a little girl to be a silly dreamer and that there is more to life than the trappings of cultural prestige. This isn’t a groundbreaking message only seen in the philosophy of modern day Buckians, but it had its influence on me and the desserts I make.

How, you ask, in total disbelief, but some gratitude that we’re veering back on topic. And the reason amounts to the idea of perfection compared to expression. I’m sure in an advanced enough computer we could come to some objective neural answers on the best combination of ingredients to elicit pleasure tuned to each individual preference. But do you know what your favorite foods tend to be? The imperfect stuff you grew up with. Maybe off brand cereal, some home brew dessert of whip cream and Oreos, or a vegetable stew with just the right consistency.

Yeah, food can taste good, but what kind of food do you really love and why? And I think that’s important when you’re considering if you want to make my recipe or not. My recipe isn’t going to change your life. It’s a really primitive and simple spell, but it is still effective. The result of the spell isn’t life changing magic, but the message of love put into the act of creation and devotion that all baking and cooking becomes.

And if you didn’t understand that, then my recipe is one part store bought whip cream and one part chocolate pudding cups mixed in a bowl. The recipe is almost nothing, but the results are something. And it’s really easy to make that, put it in cute disposable cups, nozzle spray whip cream, and serve with a cherry to kids who will love you.

You can also use it as the base for an oreo cream pie, assuming you buy the oreo pie crust from the store. It’s a recipe a literal child could make and while the results are not as rich or compelling as “true” Chocolate Mousse, for a silly heart and dreamer, it makes people just as happy. And that’s where my article ends” I said, making this entire article so far just a quote. What happens next will surprise you.

But I’ve been advised to move on and I will finally do so. However, what is necessary now is some fake words and motions. You see, we need to set up a kind of trap. Most people will just scroll to the very end to find their prize, but we won’t give them any of that. No, dear reader, we’ll give them something quite…how do you say…unsatisfying. Just don’t say a word.

I suppose it was when my third husband left me, that I really started to understand the power of Chocolate Mousse. Alone on rainy nights with nothing but my two dogs and three children, I discovered a cool and rich warmth could fill my soul as much as my mouth. The chocolaty fluff of heaven having a way of draping over my tongue as passionately and intensely as my second husband.

The hardest part by far was slowing down. Not unlike my first marriage, it was a passion that at the slightest bump could careen unpleasantly into a wall of sickly saturation. No matter how daintily it started, how brisk a flirt it would be in a tiny wine glass of decadence, my body would move on its own back to the fridge for more. No one spoonful was enough and as I shoveled more and more into my mouth, I wondered when the trees became the forest inside of my stomach.

Sometimes we don’t eat to be full, we eat to feel love, and when the food is low on love, there is no shortage we can stand. So, when you make this recipe, make it with a small batch of foreseen and enforced self control.

Perfect Chocolate Mousse Recipe

3 1/2 Cooking Chocolate
2 1/2 Eggs
2 Butter
5 Sugar
3/4 Cream (Full Fat)

Technical Challenge

1. While the ingredients are before you on a table, there are no instructions for how to perform the ritual. Somehow, they combine to create the dessert you sought.
2. With no clear instruction, one would suggest perhaps melting the chocolate at some point. Fusing the composite components into one massive slab. Whipping something is surely involved, but this is a pg-rated blog and I won’t go further into any detail, whip or not.
3. Is this not helpful? I don’t imagine it is. If you simply scrolled down here for answers didn’t you? Well you’ve been caught. Oh you’ve been caught and the clock ticks in the background, tick tock friend. You only have an hour for the technical and no telling what will happen when the judges show up. But I really must leave you to it. Best of luck and all that!