When it comes to chocolate, I’m generally of the opinion that you can’t overdo it.
This weekend, I enjoyed a Saturday brunch of biscuits and chocolate gravy, which sounds super disgusting, but it’s really a warm chocolate sauce poured over biscuits.
I’d never heard of chocolate gravy until I became a Young and learned about the southern dish from my father-in-law, who now serves it at his coffee shop, Scuttlebutts, in Hutchinson (shameless plug: they also have lots of other great food and drinks, if you’re ever in the area).
With that love of chocolate in mind, I’m going to share another recipe for you to use the homemade ricotta I told you about a few weeks ago. It’s not a recipe for chocolate gravy, unfortunately, since that’s a family secret, but it is for another great chocolate dish: mousse.
It has a little different in texture than a normal mousse, but after I chilled it and topped it with a little homemade whipped cream, I was all in on this recipe.
Plus, it’s made with sugar substitute (I think you could easily use a powdered sugar instead if you don’t have any and want to use the real stuff), so those of you who are watching your sugar intake should take note of this one, too.
It’s billed as being sugar free by the original author, but there is sugar in vanilla extract and many cocoa powders have a little as well, so I’d say you can call this “low sugar” rather than sugar free.
I found this recipe on the blog “Jane at Home.” You can find the original at http://www.imaginegreatliving.com/heavenly-ricotta-chocolate-mousse-sugar-free/. I added extra vanilla in my version. Also, while this works with homemade cheese, you can definitely use the store-bought kind for this as well.
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Ricotta Chocolate Mousse
Ingredients
1/2 cup ricotta cheese
1 rounded teaspoon cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon artificial sweetener (I used Splenda)
Directions
Combine all of the ingredients into a bowl and whisk well. For a smoother texture, combine the ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth.
Cover the bowl and chill for about an hour.
(This is meant to be one serving of mousse.)
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I didn’t blend my mousse, so it ended up with a bit of a grainy texture, which I didn’t mind, but if textures tend to bother you a lot, you might consider the blender route.
It was creamy and chocolaty and yummy.
One thing I did discover, though, was that despite my love of chocolate—especially dark chocolate—the ricotta cheese did not support the bitterness of a dark chocolate cocoa powder at all. It just lacked a lot of the sweetness I’d want from a mousse, so I’d stay away from substituting your cocoa powder if you have both kinds in your pantry.
As a quick dessert, though, I’d give this one high marks. It might be a good one to store away for the summer, too, since you don’t have to heat up your kitchen to make it, and if you’re like me and have a bit of a sweet tooth, being able to make a relatively quick chocolate dessert is a good skill to have. Plus, you have to get your daily dairy intake somehow; it may as well be combined with chocolate.
Lindsey Young is managing editor of The Clarion, the Kansas Publishing Ventures newspaper in Andale. She can be reached at lindseyclarion@gmail.com.
