As you’ve probably guessed if you’ve read my books, I’m a foodie – I love to eat, try new foods, and cook.  Although when things go awry the way they did this week, well… not so much.  But I’m addicted to recipes, and the internet is my evil enabler.

So this week I got sucked in by Blender Chocolate Mousse from a local food blogger’s site:  Dinner With Julie.  The recipe required a blender (quelle surprise), which I rarely use because it’s a pain in the ass to clean. But all the stars and planets had aligned:  I had my food processor out anyway, I happened to have whipping cream in my fridge, and the recipe sang its siren song.

(Note the critical disparity in the previous paragraph:  Blender Chocolate Mousse.  I have a food processor.  This is how fiascos begin.)

Per the instructions, I chucked the chocolate in the food processor, poured in the hot custard, and fired that sucker up.  Knowing that disaster lurks behind the simplest activities, I heeded Julie’s advice to put a towel over the food processor just in case.  But it performed faultlessly – not a single drop of chocolate marred my towel.  Smugly congratulating myself, I removed the towel and took off the food processor lid.

That’s when everything went to hell.

Blenders have watertight lids.  Food processors have lids with a large hole in them for the pusher device.  As soon as I tilted the lid to scrape the mousse off the inside, the pusher thing fell out on the counter.  It was, of course, covered with liquid chocolate mousse.  It bounced.  Several times.

Chocolate mousse splattered over several feet of counter, the backsplash, other appliances and me.  That generated some creative language, but little did I know it was only a foreshadowing of things to come.

The blending bowl in my food processor has an open tube in the centre for the driveshaft, and the blade housing sits atop it.  So you have to remove the blade housing before you pour anything out of the blending bowl.

Liquid chocolate mousse is really slippery.  The blade housing is a smooth plastic cone.  I couldn’t get hold of it.

After scrabbling uselessly at it for longer than I care to admit, I finally brained up and hooked a spatula under the blade.  When I pulled it out, chocolate mousse dribbled through the bowl opening, all over the driveshaft, and all the way to the sink; but by then everything was so sticky that it didn’t make much difference.  I poured the mousse into ramekins and turned to the cleanup.

In my defense, I’d like to reiterate that it was chocolate mousse.  And wasting chocolate is a crime.

At least, that was my excuse when Hubby rounded the corner and caught me licking the shaft of the food processor.  For the record, there are few things more embarrassing than getting caught performing fellatio on a kitchen appliance.  Especially when it’s one you don’t even love.

I mean, I could be forgiven for getting it on with my sexy European tomato press.  Even being caught in the act with my virile high-powered juicer wouldn’t have been so bad.  But a chocolate-smeared food processor?  It just seemed so… sordid.

Anyway, I got the kitchen cleaned up at last, and the mousse was delicious – silky-smooth and over-the-top chocolatey.

But I’m not sure it was worth it.

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