Passover and loss

I am preparing to make a chocolate mousse for Passover. We have this every year for dessert at our family seder. It is heavy on the eggs, dark chocolate and sugar; ask practicallty any practising Jewish family what their traditional Seder dessert is and you will find that chocolate mousse is a staple (alongside the almond plava, but this is such a terrifying concoction, designed to gum up your insides for a week, that we are not going there in this blog).  Every year we allocate responsibility for different parts of the Seder dinner menu and this year I have the desserts. I didn't used to. I used to contribute salads and I would be frying my portion of fish as busily as the next North London Jewish Mum. But this year it is desserts for me. And this is because my elder sister has died, and she was our dessert Queen, and in her absence someone needs to step in. Earlier in this blog I recounted a moving and painful afternoon in hospital with her when my niece was asking her for recipes of her most iconic desserts, and as she talked through them, her face flushed with the infection she had caught, her lids heavy, one hand clasping mine, my younger sister wrote down the recipes while I surreptitiously wiped the tears away. Thank goodness for my niece's prescience. She was preparing for exactly this day. And now it is here. And now I am making chocolate mousse according to the recipe that my sister shared with us just a few weeks before her death. So this is not an ordinary baking experience. Cracking eggs and melting chocolate my head is filled with memories of years and years of Seder dinners at which my sister would present her amazing chocolate mousse, and our kids would dig in with bionic speed, polishing it off in seconds. Memories of all her other fantastic food - her Passover pavlova, fruit towers, biscuit free cheesecakes and many other Passover-defyingly original and amazing recipes. Countless times while whisking the egg white to soft peaks, or creating a glistening chocolate mass out of the egg and melted, ridiculously overpriced Passover dark chocolate ostensibly from Switzerland (why Switzerland?? I have never understood why Switzerland has cornered the market on Passover chocolate, though it may just be that no other country has the gall to charge quite as much as they do for a block of cooking chocolate), I find myself pausing to process a related memory: my sister bringing out extra chairs for the Seder service, my sister handing out bags of marshmallows for the kids, my sister giggling at the hopeless efforts of her husband and Father to find the hidden slab of matza that the kids had hidden earlier in the evening. Making this chocolate mousse is very emotional. But the thing about Seder dinners is that they are unlike practically any other family gathering because they are so infused with the personal contribution of each participant. Our seders have for years now been at my elder sister's house. This year it will be at my parents. Laugh if you want, but my chocolate mousse is its own tribute to her years of amazing Passover desserts. That's if it turns out all right. If it collapses into a puddle I imagine I will hear her guffaws all the way through the story of the Exodus.