For Seamster Skillet's birthday, I wanted to make a nice dessert for her. She informed me she really didn't want a cake, though. So I decided to make something decadent and chocolaty that isn't cake. After browsing through my cookbooks, I decided on a chocolate semifreddo. Semifreddo means partially frozen in Italian, so I'm told. To me, this dessert is somewhere between gelato and mousse. In other words, rediculously good!
I started out with eggs:
I then beat the eggs until they were nice and frothy, which took about 5 minutes:
I left the eggs alone for a minute while I worked on the next step, sugar syrup. It's fairly simple as long as you keep an eye on it, you heat sugar and water until it just becomes clear:
At the same time, I also melted down some dark chocolate chips.
Next comes the tricky part. When the sugar syrup is ready, I poured it in a slow stream into the eggs while beating them at high speed. I temper the eggs first so they don't scramble. Once all the sugar syrup is in the eggs, I continued to beat them at high speed for about 15 minutes, until it looked like this:
Once that was done, I folded the melted chocolate in:
In another bowl, I whipped some heavy cream until it formed stiff peaks:
Last but not least, I folded the chocolate-sugar-egg mixture into the whipped cream and poured it into a mold. Then you pop it in the freezer and wait. This stuff is definitely worth the wait! Sorry to say I didn't actually get photos of it after it had been frozen. But trust me, this is great stuff. One thing I should have done, but didn't, was put some plastic wrap in the mold before pouring. I ended up not being able to get it out of the mold all at once, so people had to just spoon it out.
