No-Fail Dark Chocolate Mousse

AIRY, LIGHT, SWEET, and flavorful—what’s not to like about chocolate mousse? Unfortunately, the answer is often an overcomplicated recipe. Many versions call for some variation on the following rigmarole: Whipping cream, whipping egg whites, melting chocolate (often with egg yolks and butter), folding in the egg whites, and then adding the whipped cream—all without causing the delicate mixture to deflate. I wanted a foolproof recipe for chocolate mousse that streamlined the process.

To get started, I made half a dozen recipes from well-known dessert cookbooks. The one that best combined simplicity with good flavor called for whisking egg yolks into a mixture of melted chocolate and butter before folding in sweetened whipped egg whites. Without any whipped cream and with minimal sugar, this mousse had an intense dark chocolate flavor. But it also had a marshmallow-like texture that my tasters found unappealing.

When I tried to reduce the number of egg whites, the mousse became too heavy and ganache-like. A coworker suggested whipping whole eggs instead of just whites, a trick she had used to great effect in an olive oil cake. Because whole eggs don’t hold as much air as egg whites when whipped, the hope was that my mousse would turn out less poofy. I whipped the whole eggs until they had tripled in volume and reached the ribbon stage, and then I folded them into the melted chocolate. As I’d hoped, this