TWD: Baking Chez Moi - Marquise au Chocolat

It's Tuesday's with Dorie time again!  This week our recipe was from Baking Chez Moi, and we made Marquise au Chocolat.  That is fancy French for frozen chocolate mousse.  Sounds fancy, yes?  I served mine with vanilla creme anglaise (another recipe in the book) and some fresh raspberries.  The raspberries are actually crucial, in my opinion, as they add a nice tart zip to a sweet dessert.  Which is not to say that the dessert is too sweet.  No.  It is not.  It is absolutely delicious and divine.  But I do l like a little zip to cut the sweet sometimes, just me.

This recipe is really not difficult at all, and it even includes FOLDING ingredients (a word that makes me tremble with anxiety).  It simply involves melting a large quantity of bittersweet chocolate (my fave) with some butter (how could this possibly go wrong?).  In the mean time you whip some egg yolks with sugar and some fleur de sel or sea salt.  Fold the chocolate in to the yolks then whip up some lightly sweetened heavy cream and fold that into the mixture as well.  Pour it into a plastic wrap lined loaf pan, wrap it up and put it in the freezer.  You are done.  It needs to freeze for at least 6 hours, so it is best to think ahead a bit with this dessert.

Here is where some bakers got stumped, though.  If you look closely to my abbreviated instructions above, you will see that in no place do the egg yolks actually get COOKED.  Uh, huh.  You mean this includes RAW EGGS?  Yep, essentially that is the case.  There are things you can do to change this up, which some bakers in the group tried, but I didn't go there.  I just bought some pasteurized eggs and called it a day.  Those eggs are safe enough for me.  The percentage of eggs that contain salmonella is very small and since my eggs were pasteurized they were theoretically safe from being part of that small percentage anyway.  Plus, if you added up all of the raw cookie dough/cake batter/etc. that I have munched in my entire life, I have probably eaten about a zillion raw eggs already!  Maybe this was chance-y, but it is the route I took.  If you follow this blog, you might recall that while I was pregnant I made a tiramisu for a birthday celebration that included 2 other pregnant gals.  Tiramisu (at least my recipe) also involves uncooked egg yolks and I took the pasteurized route that time too.  You have to bake/cook in a manner that makes you comfortable, and this works for me!

Anyway, back to the dessert.  Since the mousse freezes overnight, you can also make a creme anglaise to go with it, which is refrigerated overnight.  Then the next day, at dessert time, you can just grab these two pre-made amazing items, plate them, and you are ready!  No sweat! You can see in the photo below that my plastic wrap had some wrinkles, which were sort of carved into the marquise, but I don't mind.  I am actually not sure how to line the pan without getting wrinkles?  Maybe one of the other bakers did a better job and will have some tips to share!

This dessert was made as part of my very dear friend H's birthday dinner.  Happy birthday, H!  Your friendship is an amazing blessing in my life.  What would I do without you?  It is just too dreadful to contemplate!

The recipe for Marquise au Chocolat can be found on pages 357-358 of Baking Chez Moi, and the creme anglaise can be found on page 441.