Skip to content

Top Navigation

Cooking Light Cooking Light
  • Recipes
  • Holidays
  • Cooking 101
  • Healthy Living
  • Shop
  • News
  • Good.Food.Fast
  • CL Diet

Profile Menu

Your Account

Account

  • Register/Join Now
  • Newsletters
  • Email Preferences
  • Manage Your Subscription this link opens in a new tab
Login
Logout
Pin FB

Explore Cooking Light

Cooking Light Cooking Light
  • Explore

    Explore

    • 31-Day Healthy Meal Plan

      Our 31-day calendar of meals and tips shows you how to cook more and love it with fun, family-friendly meals that come together quickly and deliciously. Read More Next
    • Dinner Tonight: Quick and Healthy Menus in 45 Minutes (or Less)

      Hundreds of delicious recipes, paired with simple sides, that can be on your table in 45 minutes or less. Read More Next
    • Our Favorite Healthy Air Fryer Recipes

      Who ever said that chicken wings, doughnuts, and pizza couldn't be healthy? Read More Next
  • Recipes

    Recipes

    See All Recipes
    • Breakfast & Brunch
    • Lunch
    • Dinner
    • Drinks
    • Recipe Makeovers
    • Quick & Healthy
    • Diabetic
    • Gluten-Free
    • Vegetarian
    • Cooking Light Live
  • Holidays

    Holidays

    See All Holidays
    • New Year, New You
    • Super Bowl
    • Valentines
    • Easter
    • Halloween
    • Thanksgiving
    • Christmas
  • Cooking 101

    Cooking 101

    See All Cooking 101
    • Essential Ingredients
    • Cooking Techniques
    • Meet the Chef
    • Cooking Resources
    • Budget Friendly
    • Smart Choices
  • Healthy Living

    Healthy Living

    See All Healthy Living
    • Weight-Loss
    • Health
    • Fitness
    • Home
    • Travel
    • Nutrition 101
  • Shop
  • News
  • Good.Food.Fast
  • CL Diet

Profile Menu

Your Account

Account

  • Register/Join Now
  • Newsletters
  • Email Preferences
  • Manage Your Subscription this link opens in a new tab
Login
Logout
Sweepstakes

Follow Us

CookingLight diet CookingLight diet
  1. Home Chevron Right
  2. Cooking 101 Chevron Right
  3. Test Kitchen Confidential: Lightened Baked Chocolate Mousse

Test Kitchen Confidential: Lightened Baked Chocolate Mousse

October 10, 2012
Skip gallery slides
Pin
Credit: Photo: Nigel Cox
Here’s how our recipe doctors lightened a classic dessert—Baked Chocolate Mousse
Start Slideshow

1 of 5

Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Lighter Baked Chocolate Mousse

Credit: Photo: Nigel Cox
Baked mousse is a classic dessert whose precise origins are unclear. It’s one of those confounding dishes (like, for example, the Japanese practice of putting crispy tempura into soup) in which a finished whipped mousse—cold, rich, a perfect balance of density and airiness—is popped into the oven. What results is a marriage of traditional chilled mousse and a fudgy flourless chocolate cake: silky smooth mousse texture with more substance in the mouthfeel and a ramped-up chocolate flavor.

These qualities are usually achieved with three key parts: a flavor agent (in this case chocolate), a meringue, and lots of heavy cream. Basically, it’s a dance of sugar and fat, in fine balance—a good example of the chemistry and physics of baking. Creating a light version was going to be tricky. We did it by “unpacking” the dessert and addressing each component separately.

1 of 5

Advertisement
Advertisement

2 of 5

Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Meet Deb Wise

Credit: Photo: Nigel Cox
Meet Deb Wise, our go-to baking expert. For this project, Deb began by cooking the full-fat-and-calorie version of the recipe to set a benchmark for flavors, mouthfeel, and chocolate intensity.

2 of 5

3 of 5

Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

1. Bargaining with Chocolate

Credit: Photo: Nigel Cox
We had to decrease the amount of chocolate in our baked mousse, as it contributes a significant amount of saturated fat. But we didn’t want to risk losing that deep, intense chocolate flavor.

Tweak: Using our nutrition analysis software, we simply reformulated the recipe by cutting the chocolate back a smidge and increasing the number of servings—not a cheat because dessert portions are often too big anyway.

Result: Fine flavor, but portion size was just too small to fit our nutrition rules. Another problem: 70% of the calories still came from fat, and most of it saturated. This was not a balanced, healthy dessert.

2nd Tweak: Deb tinkered with adding good unsweetened cocoa to replace the additional chocolate we were cutting. The cocoa laid a deep, dark chocolate foundation with very little fat, and we were still able to use 5 ounces of chocolate.

Result: Chocolate challenge solved.

3 of 5

Advertisement

4 of 5

Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

2. Whipping Meringue into Shape

Credit: Photo: Nigel Cox
Reducing chocolate also reduced volume. We needed the “loft” of egg whites but had to make sure they wouldn’t deflate. Meringue usually consists of egg whites beaten to stiff peaks. But whites in “peak” condition have expanded as much as possible and can only go down from there. We needed eggs that would puff up as they cooked—and hold that structure out of the oven.

Tweak: Deb did something radical by baking standards: She added whole eggs to the meringue, unheard of because fat prevents the whites from beating to stiff peaks. That was the method to her madness, though: The moderating influence of eggs would keep the meringue at soft peaks—getting air, but not too much—leaving room for expansion in the oven.

Result: Volume issue solved.

4 of 5

5 of 5

Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

3. Solving the Cream Conundrum

Credit: Photo: Nigel Cox
Deb preferred sacrificing sat fat–heavy whipping cream–if it meant she could keep as much chocolate as possible. But cutting the cream also affected the creamy texture.

Tweak: More radical thinking from Deb. “What would happen if I baked Cool Whip?” This idea approached the surreal: Wouldn’t the oil-and-milk suspension (which hearkens back to 1967) deflate into a pool? We had never heard of baking it before. A few examples pop up on Google, but nothing like this. Deb folded in 1-1⁄2 cups (replacing a like amount of whipped heavy cream), crossed her fingers, and pushed the springform pan in the oven. It baked beautifully. There was almost no visual—or textural—difference from the cream version. But there was a nutrition difference, a savings of 6.7 grams of total fat and more than 4 grams of saturated fat per serving (which would eat up about 20% of your daily sat fat limit).

Result: Creamy, dense texture and rich mouthfeel.

In the End: It's a fantastic cake, and that's where we left it.

5 of 5

Replay gallery

Share the Gallery

Pinterest Facebook

Up Next

Share the Gallery

Pinterest Facebook
Advertisement
Skip slide summaries

Everything in This Slideshow

Advertisement

View All

1 of 5 Lighter Baked Chocolate Mousse
2 of 5 Meet Deb Wise
3 of 5 1. Bargaining with Chocolate
4 of 5 2. Whipping Meringue into Shape
5 of 5 3. Solving the Cream Conundrum

Share options

Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message
Cooking Light

Magazines & More

Learn More

  • Cooking Light Diet this link opens in a new tab
  • Customer Service this link opens in a new tab
  • Advertise
  • Content Licensing
  • Sitemap

Connect

Follow Us
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Other Meredith Sites

Other Meredith Sites

  • 4 Your Health this link opens in a new tab
  • Allrecipes this link opens in a new tab
  • All People Quilt this link opens in a new tab
  • Better Homes & Gardens this link opens in a new tab
  • Bizrate Insights this link opens in a new tab
  • Bizrate Surveys this link opens in a new tab
  • Daily Paws this link opens in a new tab
  • EatingWell this link opens in a new tab
  • Eat This, Not That this link opens in a new tab
  • Entertainment Weekly this link opens in a new tab
  • Food & Wine this link opens in a new tab
  • Health this link opens in a new tab
  • Hello Giggles this link opens in a new tab
  • Instyle this link opens in a new tab
  • Martha Stewart this link opens in a new tab
  • Midwest Living this link opens in a new tab
  • More this link opens in a new tab
  • MyRecipes this link opens in a new tab
  • MyWedding this link opens in a new tab
  • My Food and Family this link opens in a new tab
  • MyLife this link opens in a new tab
  • Parenting this link opens in a new tab
  • Parents this link opens in a new tab
  • People this link opens in a new tab
  • People en Español this link opens in a new tab
  • Rachael Ray Magazine this link opens in a new tab
  • Real Simple this link opens in a new tab
  • Ser Padres this link opens in a new tab
  • Shape this link opens in a new tab
  • Siempre Mujer this link opens in a new tab
  • Southern Living this link opens in a new tab
  • SwearBy this link opens in a new tab
  • Travel & Leisure this link opens in a new tab
Cooking Light is part of the Allrecipes Food Group. © Copyright 2021 Meredith Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Cooking Light may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Privacy Policythis link opens in a new tab Terms of Servicethis link opens in a new tab Ad Choicesthis link opens in a new tab California Do Not Sellthis link opens a modal window Web Accessibilitythis link opens in a new tab
© Copyright . All rights reserved. Printed from https://www.cookinglight.com

View image

Test Kitchen Confidential: Lightened Baked Chocolate Mousse
this link is to an external site that may or may not meet accessibility guidelines.