Mousse Recipes - Chocolate, Fruit, Vanilla & More | Taste of Home (2024)

FAQs

What are common mistakes when making mousse? ›

The chocolate you used wasn't fluid enough

A three-drop chocolate has exactly the right cocoa butter content to produce the perfect end results. Chocolate with less cocoa butter in it will give the mousse too little texture. How to choose the right fluidity?

Some varieties of mousse add gelatin to the recipe in order to give it more structure for a mousse pie like this passion fruit blender mousse that is as stunning as it is delicious.

Step 2: Incorporating air. This is probably the most crucial step and it's what really defines the consistency of your mousse: adding air bubbles into the mouse. There are roughly two ways to do so: Whisk an ingredient that's good at holding onto air itself, such as heavy cream or eggs.

Mousse is a light and airy dessert made with eggs, sugar, heavy cream, and flavoring. All mousses have four basic components: aerated egg yolks, whipped egg whites, whipped cream, and a flavoring base.

Try adding a small amount of cornstarch to a little water, and add it to the mousse a little at a time and see how it thickens the texture. You can also beat some egg yolks in a separate bowl over low heat until they increase in volume and slowly add them to the mousse mixture.

Egg yolks – this thickens up custard mixture in the mousse and boosts richness.

If you over-whip the cream, you'll end up with a grainy mousse (although you can try to remedy it by whisking in a few extra tablespoons of cream). An electric hand mixer and a nice big bowl are my tools of choice, but a big balloon whisk and a chilled mixing bowl work well, too.

Mousse is the stuff of dessert dreams: incredibly light and also ridiculously rich. At its most basic, mousse is made by folding aerators into a base. These aerators can be whipped cream, meringue (egg whites + sugar), pâte à bombe (whole eggs and/or egg yolks + sugar), or a combination.

Sweetened mousse is served as a dessert or used as an airy cake filling. It is sometimes stabilized with gelatin. Savoury mousses can be made from meat, fish, shellfish, foie gras, cheese, or vegetables. Hot mousses often get their light texture from the addition of beaten egg whites.

What is the difference between mousse and bavarois? ›

Here are some ways that bavarois differs from mousse: Flavours: Bavarois always uses crème Anglaise as its flavour base (milk, eggs yolks, sugar). Mousse can be flavoured with virtually anything, from chocolate to cauliflower to bacon.

Mousse recipes that use raw eggs should be modified by heating the milk, eggs and sugar to 160 degrees F. Hillers recommends any recipe calling for raw eggs should be modified to either heat the eggs or to substitute a modified egg product. If your recipe can't be modified, Hillers advises finding a substitute recipe.

Bavarian creams differ from mousses in that they are usually made by thickening a custard sauce with gelatin, then folding in whipped cream (not whipped egg whites). Mousses can be served “standalone” in a dessert cup or used as filling for cakes and Charlottes.

Our answer

Make sure that the chocolate mixture has cooled properly before adding it to the whipped cream as if it is too warm it will melt the cream slightly and may be a reason for the denser texture.

A runny mousse that won't set is caused by the opposite of the reason for grainy mousse. If your mousse won't set, it is most likely because you have under-whipped the heavy cream.

Using a cream with a fat content of only 32% means that it will have a higher water content (if it is whipping to soft peaks it is probably as it has some stabilizers or thickeners added) and this water content could be causing the choccolate to seize and the mousse to separate.

Use a liaison to thicken up mousse

It can take many different shapes depending on the recipe it's being added to, but it is most often a mixture of egg yolks and heavy cream. Livestrong points out that what makes a liaison great for thickening a mousse is that it isn't adding anything new to the recipe.

To moderately thicken the mousse, use 1 1/2 teaspoons of gelatin and 4 1/2 tablespoons of water.