Mousse au chocolat à l’orange

My five-year old son enjoys watching some cooking shows, including a cartoon one called La cuisine est un jeu d’enfants (Cooking is child’s play), based on a cookbook with the same title by chef Michel Oliver. After watching, he really wanted to make their version of "chocolate pudding."

Drawings by five-year old of the cooking kids on the La cuisine est un jeu d'enfants cartoon

This recipe for chocolate mousse with orange is a fitting follow-up from my recent blog posting on medieval oranges. The recipe is not included in the cookbook, but my son watches the video over and over so I wrote down the ingredients and verified them against the recipe posted at Kalinka’s blog. The original recipe uses 8 eggs and is based on metric measurements, so I cut it to make about three-fourths the original quantity and adjusted some measurements slightly to use English measurements. Blogger Kalinka suggested an orange gelatin topping that was not part of Oliver’s original recipe, but it sounded good so I also adjusted it to English measurements.

Chocolate mousse with orange

Ingredients:

9 oz dark chocolate *

6 eggs, separated

Just over 10 tbsp butter, softened (150 g)

½ cup powdered sugar

Juice from 1 orange, small-medium

Pinch of salt

Mix the orange juice with the sugar in a saucepan and let it boil gently until it is somewhat thickened into a syrup. Remove from heat to cool.

Orange syrup

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler – you can devise one with a heatproof bowl in a pan of water.

Melting chocolate

Add the egg yolks and then the orange syrup.

Mixing the chocolate with egg yolks and orange syrup

Add a pinch of salt to the egg whites and beat until the peaks are slightly stiffened. Fold in the chocolate mixture.

Folding together the egg whites and chocolate mixture

Add to individual serving dishes if desired and cool in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight. Serve with the orange gelatin topping if desired.

With and without orange topping

Orange gelatin topping (optional)

About 2/3 cup orange juice (I used the juice from 2 oranges and 2 tangerines)

¼ cup powdered sugar

1 packet (7 g) plain gelatin

Mix the orange juice with the sugar in a saucepan and let it boil gently until it is somewhat thickened.

Mix the gelatin with about 3 tbsp water and add to the orange-gelatin mixture. Cook until firm.

The orange gelatin was good like this, but in the future I would add more orange juice (perhaps 1 cup?) to make it less stiff.

I enjoyed the mousse with the orange gelatin topping, but my five-year old preferred the mousse by itself.

Because this recipe contains raw eggs, I used pasteurized eggs. I also recommend using good-quality grass-fed butter if possible.

* Oliver specifies chocolate with at least 70% cacao, but it was difficult to find dark chocolate of known cacao concentration that didn’t have a warning about being processed on the same equipment as peanuts or tree nuts. I used a brand of chocolate chips with 65% cacao, which was the highest I could find that didn’t have the peanut warning, since we have a peanut and tree nut allergy in the household.