Snow

Living in the southwest of France means that it is mostly warm.

This time we got a bit of snow…

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Paris by night

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Mousse au Chocolat

I was asked to share my recipe for Mousse au Chocolat so that is what I am doing here now.

Ingredients:

300 – 500 ml whipped cream
200 – 300 g dark chocolate
100 g sugar
3 bags of vanilla sugar
30 ml water
5 – 6 Eggs

Material :

  • stove top to melt chocolate and create egg cream
  • casserole for the water bath
  • 2 metal bowls, one of which should be fairly large
  • 2 plastic bowls
  • whisk
  • mixer

Preparation :

  1. Heat about 1-2cm deep water in the casserole for the water bath
  2. Crumble the chocolate into the large metal bowl and put it onto the water bath to melt the chocolate. You can use a whisk to make sure it is completely melted.
  3. Put the other metal bowl with the water and the sugar on the water bath and dissolve the sugar in the water.
  4. Separate the eggs, egg white into a plastic bowl, yellow onto a plate or into a cup.
  5. Add the yellow and the vanilla sugar into the water above the bath and whisk until you have a homogeneous cream.
  6. Whip the egg white
  7. Whip the cream in the second plastic bowl
  8. Put the chocolate bowl back onto the water bath until it’s nicely soft.
  9. Add the egg cream and mix with a whisk until you have homogeneous cream. Then take the pot of the water bath.
  10. As the mix is still hot from the water bath you need to add the whipped cream now in several steps and gently fold each portion in until the two creams look homogeneous.
  11. Fold in the whipped egg white gently until you have a uniform cream
  12. You can distribute the cream now into desert bowls or just put the large bowl into the fridge where it should stay for 3-4 hours to cool the mousse.
Final Mousse au Chocolat, still in the large metal bowl.

You should play with the recipe. Depending on if you like it sweeter or darker you can use more chocolate or less sugar. If you make it really dark I would suggest trying to add some smokey whisky but be careful it changes the taste quite a bit.

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Motorbike tour in the Pyrénées

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Dream of unity

When I was young I had a dream about mankind. I thought that if just all the people on earth start mixing, eventually there was no reason for racism anymore as it would be all evenly mixed and therefore we would be more or less the same.

Today I know that this will never happen. People insist in dividing each other into categories. Black / White, Asian / Caucasian, Woman / Man, Christian / Muslim / Jewish / …

Instead of thriving in diversity, seeing strength in all of us being different and individual we are looking for uniformity and deriving a ‘better’ feeling of belonging to a certain category or group of people. Today I believe that if we could eliminate sex, religion, skin color or race, the only thing that would change is that we would draw other lines on which we could define our different categorizations like blonde vs dark haired.

I believe that if we cannot overcome this nonsense, this will be our downfall. Even more than our ignorance because it keeps us from working together which is urgently needed considering the challenges we as mankind are facing.

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