Mousse

When I was in my teens I used to load up my spectacularly huge hair with styling mousse. The stickier the better. When I got bored at school my favourite pastime was to crunch my hair in my palm and feel the shower of disentegrating solidified mousse fall like dust into my hand. My Maths teacher must have thought I had the worst dandruff in the world. Not to mention the noisiest curls. The mousse was so stiff you could literally hear my locks clang as they hit against each other while I walked from class to class. Well. I gave all that up once I passed that adolescent rebellion thing and developed some mature empathy. The kind that helps you to the realisation of what it is like for anyone around you when you have embalmed hair that you manually liberate over their pints of cider at the local pub. The older I have got, the less product I have used in my hair, the better looking, frankly, it has got. I was in a shopping centre yesterday and was stopped twice by admiring punters wanting to know what I was putting in my hair. Umm, nothing really, I say. They look at each other disbelievingly. I want to tell them this is not faux middle aged modesty but as this is clearly not going to be bought, I direct them to the stickiest hair mousse Boots has to offer. Anything to keep my fellow citizen happy. Which brings me, not entirely logically, to the sort of mousse that you eat. I made a chocolate marquise yesterday (about which I have already waxed lyrical) - this is a cake you make in two parts, the flourless base first, which then has to cool completely before you make the top half as a chocolate mousse. Then the whole thing has to chill overnight to set completely. I made the bottom half, stared at it admiringly as it cooled slowly and beautifully on my stove, and then thought, I can't stand this any longer. I have to make a chocolate mousse. Who cares if it's not the one I end up pouring on the cake? A houseful of adolescents ensures swift despatch of all extraneous baking matter. I look up recipes and discover, not wholly surprisngly, that every celeb chef has at least one mousse recipe to offer. And there is a bewildering array. You can make sugar free mousse, egg white free mousse, egg free mousse, mousse with knobs on, mousse with alcohol and mousse with fruit. Blimey. I settle on Nigella's offering on the grounds that it's quick, and that it uses marshmallows - I mean, what can be more fun than chucking marshmallows into a bowlful of melting chocolate? And I do have fun with it, and put it in the fridge, and it tastes amazing, and by evening, as predicted, it's all gone. So I start on the second one, the one that will go on top of the dark, flourless base. This time it is the Organic Green and Black recipe, and they call for a ridiculous quantity of eggs. I whisk the whites, whisk the cream, melt the chocolate, add the vanilla, fold it all carefully together, pour it on the base, put it in the fridge, and then turn back to see a bowl full of egg yolks that should have been added to the chocolate. I have, in fact, by default, made the Jamie Oliver mousse from an Organic Green and Black recipe. Which makes me feel vaguely disloyal. But not for long,because the marquise is a triumph. Your hair looks fab, says my mate as she digs in. What are you putting on it?