Colette Martin’s Learning to Bake Allergen-Free is publishing today. To celebrate, we’re…making chocolate mousse!

The Ingredients

Whisking the mousse!

“But mousse isn’t allergen-free,” you might protest. “And even if it were, it isn’t baked.” To which we would respond, “Colette’s is!” She’s developed her very own egg-free, dairy-free chocolate mousse recipe and also gives readers a quick lesson on how to “bake” using the dry heat of a stovetop rather than an oven.

Our motto here at The Experiment is “Because every book is a test of new ideas,” and Colette Martin really exemplifies this attitude. Her spirit of perseverance and adventure helped her to not only make it through her son’s diagnosis with multiple serious food allergies, but to come out on the other side with a treasure trove of new tools and recipes, plus the desire to share them. Much of what she now knows about cooking without the top eight allergens (plus gluten) came from her willingness to re-imagine her own kitchen as a laboratory, to dive in and, well, experiment! If you flip through her book, I think you’ll find that her desire to play around and figure things out for yourself is infectious–we definitely caught the bug, anyway!

For example, in a fun section titled “Not All Chocolate Is the Same,” Colette walks us through an experiment comparing the way two different brands of allergen-free chocolate chips behave on their way to becoming egg-free, dairy-free mousse. She used Enjoy Life chips and Schokinag chips and studied the way they looked, felt, and tasted before, during, and after being refrigerated. We tried it too, using Divvies chocolate chips, and observed the following:

Before refrigeration: Thick, creamy, and not at all eggless-seeming (though we learned a crucial lesson about the importance of thorough whisking when working with egg replacer!)

During refrigeration: Two hours in, it had set up nicely and could be heard shouting, “Eat me!” even with the refrigerator door closed.

After refrigeration, and topped with Colette’s fabulous Whipped Coconut Cream (also in the book): Well…see for yourself!

The finished mousse, topped with Whipped Coconut Cream

For other tasty experiments (complete with far more scientific observations) and for approximately a billion helpful tips and tricks and many great recipes for baking allergen-free foods, check out Learning to Bake Allergen-Free.

Happy launch day!