Mousse

 Many years ago, I made a Valentine's Day dinner for the woman who would later become my wife.  It was a disaster, of the sort that, in prior years, would have epic poems written about it.  Dessert was chocolate mousse, Julia Child's recipe, which I had made before with spectacular results.  This time, it didn't work.  Turns out that she can't eat anything with raw eggs in it, and the "foam" part is uncooked egg white.  Additionally, I added some Chambord (expensive raspberry liqueur) and it Just Didn't Work.  The fact that our relationship survived at all is seriously impressive -- that was just one disaster of many that evening.

 

Anyway, I was under orders Not to Cook today, but I made this mousse anyway.  The only ingredients are chocolate and water -- no chance of accidentally poisoning the Love of my Life.  Admittedly, the Food Elves swapped the bittersweet chocolate that I bought with semisweet before I got it home, but it worked anyway.

 

This, I think, is the new Ur-mousse; the mousse against which all others are measured; the mousse that casts its shadow on the wall of Plato's cave.  Is it the best of all possible chocolate mousses?  No; it could be improved -- next time, I'm adding a bit of amaretto and using much higher cacao content chocolate -- but it is the base that everything else must be compared to.