Death by Chocolate

You log in to check your Facebook news feed and there it is...a sinful dessert recipe that screams, "Try Me"!  Normally I ignore the advertisements, but this little video was too hard to resist.

I like to craft and this recipe presented a challenge.  Not only is the raspberry chocolate mousse topped with fresh berries, but it's served in little chocolate cups you have to make yourself.

I don't recommend trying to put this recipe together in anything less than 3 hours, especially if it's your first attempt.  It took a while to temper the chocolate, chill the bowls, set the mousse and make it all look pretty in the meanwhile.

I also suggest doing it on a cool day.  I chose a beautiful sunny day in the summer and I found it hard to get the chocolate bowls out of the tinfoil without melting some of the chocolate with my warm hands.

When the opportunity to cook for my family came up and I eagerly went back to find the video and recipe posted via Home Cooking Adventure. 

Most of the ingredients were easy to find.  The chocolate came from Bulk Barn and as raspberries are just coming into season in Southern Ontario, it wasn't hard to find them either. 

The hardest part was finding the tin cups.  I found tinfoil muffin pans, but in the end I settled on individual little pot pie cups.  This created fewer bowls & wider ones, but worked fairly similarly. 


I came across a few challenges making the bowls, but eventually succeeded.  The recipe suggests you may need to melt the chocolate again in between making each bowl.  I found it was too hot to start with and the chocolate poured out of the mold too easily when flipped upside down to cool.  Also, take your time rotating the cup.  Too fast and your chocolate will come spinning out and make an incredibly amazing mess.  I speak from experience!

Take your time getting the bowl out of the mold.  I found I needed to cut the tinfoil in multiple places to work well.  If you rush it or try to push the limits, you'll end up breaking the bowl.

The chocolate mousse was fairly easy to make, but I did find the chocolate was too hot to fold the cream into.  After I mixed the 1/3 of my whipped cream into the chocolate, I put it in the fridge to let it firm up a bit before folding it back into the remaining whipped cream. 

Filling the bowls was easy, but the mousse mixture was warm enough to soften the bowls.  This step needs to be done fairly quickly, in my experience, to keep the bowls firm.  After that, the finish line is in sight.  Dress your cups just before serving and enjoy!

After my family devoured the cups, we debated whether the recipe could be improved.  I found the dessert incredibly rich and sweet and it was suggested that perhaps the chocolate cups were a bit too much.  Someone proposed serving the mousse in little cocktail glasses would be better and then you could create little chocolate drizzle toppers to stick into the mousse as it was cooling.  Switching from raspberry to mint was also a popular idea.

Either way, the dessert was still a hit and very attractive.  Smaller sized cups are probably the way to go unless you are entertaining chocoholics.  In which case, go all out!