Raspberry mousse is ready to serve in small glass jars, garnished with marbled chocolate slices, fresh berries, and a sugared rim.
PR Cooks! The Culinary Adventures of the Press-Republican Staff
What a
Mousse! By McKenzie Delisle
Selecting the recipe for this month’s issue was the easy part. It needed to have chocolate. It needed to have pink. It needed to have Valentine’s Day. And, since I’m a lover of the Emmy award-winning television show "Queer Eye," it needed to have Antoni Porowski, too. The Netflix original series is a remake of the early-2000s reality show, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Similar to its namesake, the updated version's five gurus pool their expertise to refine the average man or woman's style, diet, personal care, cultural pursuits, and interior design. The show's experts, dubbed the Fab Five, include Bobby Bark, Karamo Brown, Tan France, Jonathan Van Ness, and Antoni himself. Antoni, the show's cooking expert, released his cookbook "Antoni in the Kitchen" last year and, during his travel cooking show/book tour, the 35-year-old chef made an October stop just north of the North Country in his hometown of Montreal. As an obsessed fan, I purchased meet-and-greet tickets for that stop, 24
buying a front row seat in the Rialto Theatre, a photo with the star, and an autographed cookbook. And, when it was time to choose a Valentine's Day-themed recipe, I dusted off my (unused) cookbook and flipped straight to the desserts. My eyes were quick to land on photos of something pink, creamy, and covered in chocolate. Antoni called it the Raspberry Mousse Dome and I called it love at first sight. The dish looked somewhat intimidating, but, when in doubt, I thought back to the reality TV star up on the stage of the Montreal theatre, whipping together recipes from his book right before my eyes. So, just like how some people have eyes bigger than their stomachs, I learned I have eyes bigger than my
skills in the kitchen. To start, I followed Antoni's guidelines, but added my own flair here and there. Like when cooking down the frozen raspberries, I tossed in a couple tablespoons of lemon juice, too. That was a trick I learned from my mom and grandma. I always assumed the lemon's acid helped breakdown the other fruit, but I don't know if that's true. What I do know is lemon always adds some extra tang, so, I thought, why not? Per Antoni's recipe, it was time to use a sieve to separate the juice from the raspberry. And, without a sieve to my name, this was the first major setback. Thanks to a stroke of genius, which was not my own, the idea to use a
