Random Recipes 15.05

Here's an experiment in Chocolate Mousse - using silk tofu, vanilla extract, and amaretto.

Here are the ingredients: 1/8 cup white sugar, 4 eggs (separated), 1/2 package of semisweet chocolate chips, 3/4 cups heavy whipping cream (or if you are not splitting the recipe in half to allow for silk tofu then use 1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream), and extra bowls for pouring stuff into.

I know they always say to heat the chocolate over boiling water in a double layer pan, but honestly, if you know how to do it you can perfectly melt chocolate using the microwave.  Start small, with say 1 minute.  Then stir generously, try to evenly distribute, then heat for another 30 seconds.  Mix again generously, try to let the stored heat melt all the remaining solid chips.  If that doesn't do it, try another 15 seconds.  It should turn out okay.  Mix the white sugar with the egg yolks until smooth, and while WARM (not HOT, you don't want to cook the eggs when you add the chocolate to them...) add the chocolate - this should be one of the last steps, while you are beating the egg whites.  You don't want the chocolate-yolk-sugar mixture to cool in the meantime or it is hard to blend into the heavy whipping cream or silky tofu, whichever you are using.

Here is the heavy whipping cream after mixing for a long time with egg beaters on high - you can use a whisk but I don't see any difference.  It takes a few minutes but I promise it ends up looking like this

Here are the egg whites after being thoroughly mixed.  At this point, you will add the chocolate-yolk-white sugar mixture into the whipped heavy whipping cream and mix until smooth.  After that, add the whipped egg whites and fold into the mixture until smooth.  Then separate into bowls and cover with plastic wrap and place in refrigerator for a few hours.

Here are the various bowls of chocolate mousse - half are made with heavy whipping cream, the other half are made with blended silk tofu.  Each mixture has three bowls.  In each subdivision, one of the bowls is left as is, another is given 1/3 tsp vanilla extract, and another is given 1/3 tsp amaretto liqueur.  Just a little experiment.

At the end of the experiment - I thought they all tasted quite yummy, however, I gotta say that tofu doesn't quite add the punch that the heavy whipping cream adds.  It's plenty edible, but with a semi-blind taste test, Kit preferred the three that used heavy whipping cream to the three that had soy, and he thought the vanilla was too strong in the one with added vanilla. 

We did end up with an interesting conclusion:  The chocolate mousse with heavy whipping cream that had the added amaretto liqueur was equivalent in taste to the chocolate mousse without the amaretto.  Essentially that gives me permission to add a little amaretto to the mixture the next time I make chocolate mousse.  In the meantime, I get sole ownership of the remaining chocolate mousse samples, while Kit eats the remaining "chewy" chocolate chip cookies that I didn't like.

More to come later!