Flutterby™! : Blackberry mousse in chocolate cups

Dessert last night: Make chocolate cups. Inflate and wash water balloon sized balloons, temper chocolate (heat dark chocolate to 115°F, but not over 120°F, cool to 84°F, reheat to not over 90°F), dip balloons in chocolate and place on wax paper. Reserve a little bit of melted chocolate to patch the inevitable holes in the bottoms where the balloon sagged down to the wax paper.

When these things harden up, pop the balloons. Something to try a bit more next time that I experimented with a bit yesterday: How to mix in some grated (mandarin) orange rind.

Once the chocolate has hardened pop the balloons: Poof, instant (well, okay, it takes quite a while to do the tempering, but it can be done as a background process while you're in the kitchen anyway) dessert bowls.

We were going to try for a rhubarb mousse, but we were shopped out and our favorite grocery store (and last stop) didn't have any, so we got frozen blackberries and a few fresh for garnish. Mousse was:

• 3 egg whites (we used the yolks in a goat cheese tart that'll come later when I refine that recipe a bit more).

Beaten to soft peaks, add

• 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
• pinch of salt.

Meanwhile, have heated

• 3/4 cup of sugar
• 1/4 cup of water

to 238°F (ie: a simple syrup). With mixer running, pour this syrup into the egg whites.

In a separate bowl, beat a cup of heay cream to peaks, add 2 tablespoons blackberry liqueur at the end of beating, then fold together with the whites and freeze for a while. Soften up a bag of frozen blackberries, fold them into the mousse, and spoon that into the chocolate cups. Garnish with fresh blackberries.

I think next time I might run the frozen blackberries through a strainer to remove the seeds, but the result was very much a crowd pleaser.

However, we're going to stay a bit more traditional for Thanksgiving.

For more hints on how to work with chocolate, I strongly recommend Elaine Gonzalez's awesome book: The Art of Chocolate. If you've got a little more time, for instance, you could put little cocolate roses, or even chocolate blackberries and leaves, around the edges...