Cappucino mousse, anyone?

Hello Friends,
I've been meaning to share this recipe since St. Valentine's Day, but somehow the last couple of weeks seem to have vanished in a time-warp of knitting cats, rhubarb, seed-sowing & meetings. 

I love to collect recipes & experiment with cooking new things, but I'm also a great re-visitor of my more 'vintage' recipes - those dishes I used to make frequently in the past, but have fallen out of my immediate repertoire. For Valentine's Day, the Big Hairy Half of the Relationship, no stranger to the kitchen himself, announced that he was cooking a meal & that all I would need to 'bring' was myself & dessert. This seemed a good time to resurrect my cappucino mousses.....a dessert I clearly hadn't made for at least 17 years, as the BHHOTR rather sniffily informed me that he'd never had the opportunity to try one!

There's a delightful kitschness to these, with their sprinkled snowy-swirled tops & little spoons in the saucers (sorry, I went a bit 'Nigella' there, for a moment.....), as they are served in coffee cups. The original recipe suggested using demi-tasse cups, which is essential if you need to serve 6 people, but if you are serving 4, or feel like making a pig of yourself, then standard cups are fine.

I've seen various mousse recipes over the years which seem to involve more la-di-dah fancypants preparation than I usually want to be bothered with. Not this one. Even people who say they 'can't cook' need not feel threatened, as the culinary skills set is so basic. Can you make a cup of instant coffee? Melt chocolate? Use an electric whisk? There's really no more to it than that.

Cappucino Mousses
175g dark chocolate (I use Waitrose or Co-op own-brand (fairtrade), though the well-known alleged tax-avoiding variety also works well. Avoid the very high-cocoa content premium brands for this, as I sometimes find they don't work as well in old recipes compiled before these brands became common-place)
1 tbsp good quality instant coffee granules
3 tbsp boiling water
2 egg yolks
5 egg whites 
60g caster sugar
5 tbsp double cream
142ml (ish) extra double cream to decorate
1 tsp cocoa powder

Break the chocolate into pieces & put in a heatproof bowl with the sugar. Dissolve the coffee in the 3 tbsp boiling water & add it to the chocolate. Now melt the coffee, chocolate & sugar together in the bowl set over a small pan of simmering water. 
While that's going on, separate the eggs & eat the leftover chocolate. You're doing the work making the dessert aren't you? Chef's anti-oxidants. Put the egg whites in a large bowl & the egg yolks in a mug. Check how the chocolate's getting on. 
When the chocolate has melted, remove the bowl from the heat, & stir in the egg yolks. The chocolate is unlikely to be hot enough to scramble the yolks, but stir them in well, just in case. Put this mixture aside to cool for 10 mins.
Meanwhile, use an electric whisk to whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks. If you can turn the bowl upside down over your head without them moving, they are probably stiff enough. Rinse the beaters & in a small bowl, whisk the 5tbsp of cream until stiff, & fold it into the chocolate mixture. 
Next take as big a blob of the egg whites as you can fit on a tablespoon without being silly about it, & fold it into the chocolate mixture. Now using a spatula, carefully scrape the contents of the chocolate bowl into the big egg white bowl & fold together gently until everything is nicely combined.
Spoon the mixture into 6 demi-tasse or 4 standard size coffee cups & leave to set in the fridge overnight. 

Next day - At some point before you want to eat them, whisk the rest of the cream until stiff, then pipe a swirl on top of each cup. Dust with a titchy bit of cocoa powder before serving. Pop each cup on a saucer with a teaspoon & let your guests think you have spent ages making something complicated.

Two useful things about this recipe - I like things which can be made the day before so I can get ahead. It leaves more time for a glass or two of wine when, with less foresight, you could have been running out of time. Technically, this should set in a few hours, but overnight is the really reliable option. Secondly, if you have any mousses leftover (i.e you have invited hairshirt-wearing dessert phillistines to your house), they will be fine in the fridge for another day. You might have had a really crap day at work by then, or or spent all day trying to avoid self-servative bozos on the telly, so a little treatypoo in the fridge awaiting the arrival of your frazzled self might be just what you need!
So there we have it - a slightly retro, very lovely dessert that I wish I'd re-discovered earlier. 
Did it go down well with the BHHOTR? It really did (until I suggested that I might serve it in our tiny espresso cups next time!)

Well, for Albert Whiskers fans, this has been his level of industry for pretty much all of today. It's been an all-day mixture of rain, sleet & sunshine, so he managed to blag the sunny end of the sofa & inspected the back of his eyelids for a few hours. However, he's now gone off to continue a Very Important Mission - to try & find the robbing gobbler who snuck through his catflap last night when everyone was immersed in watching the finale of 'Shetland' & stole his biscuits! He has taken an extremely dim view of this, has been over every centimetre of the interloper's route in, & I can only imagine what a pasting he (because it was probably Splodgy) or she (because it could just have been Champers) is going to get when he catches up with them! You'd think the smaller cats would avoid our house by now, as we always adopt these older ex-street cats, but they don't seem to learn.
Oh well, it feels like time to light the fire & put the kettle one.
Have a good weekend, everyone,
C x