Lemon Mousse Crumble

I’ve been wanting to make something light and fun to reflect the light and fun mood I’ve been experiencing lately. Why are you all light and sunny, you might ask? The only answer that springs to mind is vitamins. Don’t underestimate the power of vitamins.

Or lemons! Especially when you’re making lemony things on a winter day. You can fool yourself and think it’s summertime.

Before I get to the actual lemon mousse crumble recipe, I have two author-related things to say. No wait, three! I have three author-related things to say. The first is that my romance has a new cover and it looks like this.

Woot, woot! I really love the new look. It looks more romantic, doesn’t it. And French. To celebrate, The Viscount of Maisons-Laffitte is on sale for .99 through Sunday, so if you haven’t yet gotten your copy, you can do so in these three places (each “Amazon” is a link):

Amazon.com, Amazon UK or Amazon Canada

The second thing is that I’m going to be putting out a more regular author newsletter. This is completely separate from my blog posts. Up until now I’ve only written a letter about two or three times a year – only when I have something new to say. But I found this community of writers (really good writers) who are sharing book promotions so I’ll be including free and discounted book deals in every newsletter.

The main type of books will be clean romance with a spattering of memoir, books about Paris, and regular romance (no erotica). If you’d like to get more book deals in your inbox, you can sign up for the newsletter, by clicking here. It’s my author website, and the sign-up form is on the right-hand side.

Click to sign up for my author newsletter.

Lastly, I hope to have something exciting to share in the way of new releases, but it’s too soon to say anything definitive. In anticipation of good news, I’ve created a FB fan page, again separate from the blog, which will be devoted wholly to books – my own and more of those book deals. I’ll be posting more frequently on the FB author page than I will be sending out newsletters. I’d be glad to have you like the page, and if you’re not interested in the book news, you can always click unfollow.

Click to follow my Facebook Author Page.

Now let’s get back to the lemons!

I got the recipe from a French site here. It’s interesting because it said lemon curd is from Brittany. I’m not sure if that’s true because I saw an English site that said lemon curd was English. Considering the close ties between Brittany and Great Britain, I suppose it’s of no matter. Or it’s a little of both.

I made the lemon curd a day in advance, and I’ll include the instructions here. But if you want a truly easy recipe, you could always buy the lemon curd and have an instant dessert. This recipe makes double the lemon curd you will need, so if you don’t plan to make mini lemon pies, halve the recipe.

You’ll need four lemons. Zest two of the lemons and juice them. You can always zest a third lemon, then take little peel curls from the fourth one and set it aside before you juice the other two (more on that in a minute). I ended up just using other lemons for the extra zest.

In case I lost you with my rambling lemon instructions, for the lemon curd itself you only need the zest of 2 lemons and the juice of four. Crack four eggs into the lemon mixture and whip them. Add 250 grams of sugar (1.25 cups) and whip that in too. Then you need 100 grams of cold butter (3.5 oz) cut into chunks. Put that in too.

You need a double-boiler to heat the lemon curd, and I used a stainless steel bowl over a wok. Turn on the fire and start the timer. You need to stir the mixture the entire time for twenty minutes or else you get chunks of eggs in there. I listened to a podcast while I stirred and it ended up being fun. At first the mixture is quite liquidy.

And then after twenty minutes it gets thick.

Put the lemon curd into jam jars and refrigerate it. It lasts for a month in the fridge if you decide to use the whole recipe and keep the second jar for later.

Now you’ve done the hard part if you’re making the lemon curd from scratch. Time for the easy part.

Not all cream whips well in France so I look for the ones that specify that it’s great for chantilly. To further help the whipping process, I put the beaters and the bowl in the freezer ahead of time.

You need 30 cl of heavy cream, which is about 1 1/3 cups. I made a detour from the recipe here and added 2 tablespoons of fine sugar and the zest of another lemon to add more colour and flavour to the cream. Whip that up, and add 250 grams of lemon curd, which is just under 1 1/4 cups – just about one jam jar, or half of the recipe you’ve made.

Another recipe detour I made was to skip the gelatine since I would have had to include it when the lemon curd was still warm. I had made it a day ahead of time and it was cold. It turns out I didn’t need that gelatine.

Whip it all together. Now fill the glass ramekins (so you can see the layers – clear is better). I used a pastry bag, but you can spoon it in. Fill them about half-way with the mousse.

It looks so white, doesn’t it? But there is a strong, delicious lemon flavor.

Then crumble a cookie in each ramekin – you could use cinnamon, sugar, or chocolate chip cookies. I used store-bought, GF chocolate chip. Then you sort of squish down the mousse with the cookie to make it more flat in order to get the second layer of mousse evenly distributed on top.

Now let’s talk about quantity. I made 5 because it was for our family, but you need to have a really big appetite for that not to be too much. Either you’ve had a salad for dinner or you’re eating this for the middle of the afternoon snack break. But if you’re going to divide it into 6 (or for a really reasonable size) 8, use smaller ramekins so it doesn’t look like the mousse is puny in the dish.

Finally, top the dishes with the remaining mousse. You can decorate the top with another cookie, or those lemon peel spirals I was telling you about, or a piece of chocolate. I found really thin 70% chocolate wafers from Carte d’Or and used those.

Doesn’t it look pretty? And a perfect dessert to impress your dinner guests?

Or simply one to gobble up en famille.

Yum!

Here’s to wishing you a really relaxing and joyful weekend. (Full of sun and lemony things).

If you’d like more French recipes, click here for my recipe index.

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