How to "Fake" A Fancy Dessert

I don't know about you, but I love dessert and I like for it to look pretty (if possible), but I really don't like to spend hours and hours in the kitchen. Well, last week Jamie and I were craving another dessert but didn't have time to make it. It requires several steps and we were looking for something quick and here is what we came up with:

I had seen several links on Pinterest for making chocolate bowls using balloons that were dipped in melted chocolate. After reading quite a few stories on how some of the balloons burst and chocolate went everywhere I got a little nervous to try them. If I were back in VA I would have given it a try but seeing how we are still at my parents house, I was pretty sure my dad would die if he walked in to find balloons bursting with melted chocolate spraying all over his kitchen! I had seen somewhere where a person had made a chocolate bowl with cupcake liners so I figured I would play around with that and give that a try. Well, they were a lot of fun and super easy!

First we got one of those bags of chocolate candy that you can find pretty much anywhere. We got ours at Michael's. I am pretty sure you could just melt chocolate chips too, though if you wanted. We just put ours in a bowl and popped it in the microwave for about 25 seconds then stirred it, then 25 more seconds, then stirred, and so on until it was nicely melted.

(Yes, that is a paint brush next to the spoon - I will explain that in a minute.)

Now plop a nice big spoonful into the cupcake liner.

Now use the brush and kind of tilt the cupcake liner to the side and "paint" the sides. You want it to be pretty thick. And don't worry - this isn't a yucky old paintbrush! =) I bought this little brush in the baking aisle at Michael's.

Now set them in a muffin/cupcake tin and pop them in the freezer.

After about 30 minutes or so you can pull them out and just peel off the paper.

Now for the mousse! I just used a mix - I told you this was easy!

I followed the directions on the box and mixed it up.

Now you could just spoon it like that into the chocolate bowls but I wanted to have a little fun with mine. Seeing how I had purchased this little set for the chocolate rosette cake I made I figured I might as well use it for this as well!

I added the mousse to the bag and then just piped it into the chocolate bowl (with some help from Lillie so it's not perfect!) =) and then added a few chocolate shavings and that was it!