How to make chocolate cake with Hervé This’s Chocolate Mousse

Tuesday 1st September 2011, Recipe 20110901C

How to make chocolate cake Hervé This’s Chocolate Mousse – an introduction

If you had read my previous article on Hervé This’s Chocolate Mousse I didn’t realise I could convert the chocolate mousse to chocolate cake. You would know that I had improved upon the chocolate mousse by adding more dairy butter. Now I would like to show you how to convert the mousse into a chocolate cake. This chocolate cake is unbelievably quick to make and you can make large quantities and bake them in batches.

 

Here is the recipe for the improved mousse for the chocolate cake

 

Chocolate Mouse
Item	Ingredients	Percentage	Weight	Weight
		(%)	(g)	oz.
1	Cocoa Powder	100	100	3.52
2	Coco butter	100	100	3.52
3	Butter	30	30	1.06
4	Sugar	130	130	4.58
5	water	100	100	3.52

You will notice that I had increased the dairy butter contents to prevent the mousse from weeping. Please refer to my article on Hervé This’s Chocolate Mousse to see how to make the mousse but follow this recipe. That previous recipe does not have the dairy butter added. Furthermore I am using a one to one ration (1:1) of Cocoa powder to flour ratio. That is a lot of cocoa powder into a chocolate cake. This makes the chocolate cake flavour very strong and very dark … and more expensive.

 

The chocolate cake recipe

 

ChocolateCake recipe
Item	Ingredients	Percentage	Weight	Weight
		(%)	(g)	oz.
1	Bread Flour	50	50	1.76
2	Self-raising flour	50	50	1.76
	Subtotal	100	100	3.52
3	Eggs	30	30	1.06

You will notice that I am using good quality high water absorbency bread flour to make the chocolate cake. You may suspect, at this point that the chocolate cake will not turn out well due to the presence of bread flour … lets us see about that.

 

Photos of chocolate cake making process

Once you have made the mousse do let it cool down to room temperature as we do not want the eggs to be cooked when added if not you will get mousse and scrambled eggs. The eggs contain the emulsifier, lecithin, which is extremely good at mixing oils and water and we want the lecithin  to be effective and not locked up in the denatured proteins.

 

 

Add the eggs into the cooled mousse and whisk it with a stick blender. The mousse looks like it is too stiff to mix with the eggs but it will.

 

 

The eggs will be whisked very quickly. The mousse still looks shiny and smooth.

 

 

Add the flour mixture and whisk with the stick blender. Before you turn on the stick blender just stir the flour into the mousse so that the flour will not fly all over the kitchen when you turn on the stick blender.

 

 

The flour has been whisked into the mousse. You will notice the colour of the mousse batter has lighten a little.

 

 

Sorry I was in a bit of a hurry to put the cake in for baking as the oven was very hot and as a result the camera shook. Bake the cake for 15 minutes at 210C (410F). . You could watch the water boil out during the baking process. It did start to burn hence I know that 15 minutes bake time is too long for this type of recipe. Next time around will will bake the cake for 10 minutes and hopefully it will turn out better.

 

 

The final baked cake. It was a little too dark chocolaty for my taste hence I did not take more pictures. And I may have burnt it ever so slightly. It does look a little dull chocolate colour. I didn’t even try to eat it, just a little taste here and there to see how bad it really was.  Not bad, not bad, really not too bad for a first attempt.

 

 

This is a very simple chocolate cake based upon Hervé This’s Chocolate Mousse. It was a little dry so I had to improve on this recipe. Please see the next article for the improved version.

 

 

You are welcome to see other peoples chocolate recipes if have lost confidence in my experiments, Famous Chocolate and chocolate cake Recipes but I assure I will solve this in the near future.

 

This article “How to make chocolate cake with Hervé This Chocolate Mousse” was researched and written by Peter Achutha.