Chocolate mousse

A chocolate mousse with a functioning jelly layer (left) and non-functioning (right)

I’ve had a recipe for a Raymond Blanc chocolate mousse pinned up in my kitchen for about two years now, but we have people round so rarely that I’ve never made it – finally I had cause to make it this weekend and it was terrific and I recommend it to you.

This amount is enough to fill 6 x 150ml containers about 3/4 of the way up, which I think is the right amount of chocolate mousse – any more gets a bit sickly. I use whisky tumblers but you can use 6 of whatever you’ve got.

To measure how much any random container can hold, fill it with water and then pour the water into a measuring jug.

Raymond Blanc’s chocolate mousse

42 g EACH of dark and milk chocolate, broken into bits – this is really important, just milk will be yucky and just dark will be too bitter

4 free-range egg whites

a dash of lemon juice, literally just a little squeeze – maybe ten drips?

10g caster sugar

1 melt the chocolate in a bowl over some simmering – or just very hot – water

2 Whisk the egg whites on a medium speed with the lemon juice until they form soft peaks. Then turn the speed up on your electric whisk to FULL BONGOES and whisk the caster sugar in until you achieve firm peaks.

3 Take a third of the egg whites and whisk them confidently into the warm melted chocolate, then combine the rest of the chocolate and egg white together in whichever is the largest vessel. Do this reasonably gently so that you don’t knock out all of the whisked-in air but don’t leave any white streaks of egg whites showing. And if that isn’t a bastardly instruction I don’t know what is.

Chill for at least 6 hours in the fridge. I went a bit mad and added a blood orange jelly, which worked very well on some pots but was a bit of a disaster on others (see above) and I think on balance didn’t add much to the flavour so I wouldn’t bother if I were you.