Aquafaba Chocolate Mousse
Song suggestions:
Something Beautiful - Tom Walker
What A Day - Ben Howard
Ingredients (makes 3 mousses)
the aquafaba from 1 tin good quality chickpeas
100g milk or dark chocolate (if choosing dark, go for one with the lowest % of cocoa solids you can find)
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
4 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp dairy free butter
Pinch of salt
Recipe:
Into a bowl, break the chocolate up into pieces and add the butter. Melt it whichever way you know best (microwave or bain-marie). Add the pinch of salt and set aside to cool whilst you whip the aquafaba.
Using an electric whisk or stand mixer, whisk up the aquafaba with the cream of tartar. Add the sugar 1 tsp at a time. It’ll take about 5 minutes on a high setting to whisk to stiff peaks. Test over your head if you’re feeling brave!
Once whisked up, spoon in two tablespoons worth of aquafaba into the chocolate mix. Using a spatula, GENTLY fold it into the chocolate, being careful not to knock the air out of the aquafaba. Keep going until all the aquafaba is folded in.
Divide into bowls to serve and refrigerate overnight to firm up. This is where the magic happens!
The science and top tips:
Why does this work? Chocolate is completely solid at room temperature - when you add vegetable oil to the chocolate, it stops it from crystallising as it cools and keeps it liquid enough but not so liquid that the mousse can’t set. If you just melted the chocolate and added it in to the aquafaba, you’d get hard lumps of chocolate forming in the middle of the mousse (speaking from experience of my first few attempts at this…)
If you have time/remember, chill your aquafaba in the back of the fridge the night before. I don’t know whether this is just my confirmation bias but it seems to thicken/whip up better after a day being all cold.
Garnish ideas: fresh raspberries, chocolate shavings, whipped coconut cream and mint leaves.
A Bite Out of Life
My Dad’s never been much of a cooker, nor a baker, and so when I asked him this week if he wanted to bake cookies with me after work, I was expecting a ‘no thank-you!’ - but to my Christmas miracle of a surprise he said ‘yes - why not?’. Why not INDEED! I made the dough whilst he was at work so when he got home all we had to do was roll it out, cut out the biscuits and bake them. We put on his favourite 80’s playlist, got dancing about the kitchen and cut out about 40 gingerbread cookies. An evening to cherish and biscuits to last us a week - what more could we want?
