Make Fluffy And Creamy Lemon Mousse With Just 3 Ingredients

Lemon desserts are full of bright, tangy flavor, and are perfect for when you want something sweet that isn't too heavy or rich. One of the lightest and most refreshing is lemon mousse, each airy spoonful bursting with creamy citrus flavor that smoothly melts in your mouth. Making mousse often requires blooming gelatin or warming eggs on the stove. But an easy online recipe produces fluffy and creamy lemon mousse without having to do either, using just three ingredients: lemons, evaporated milk, and sweetened condensed milk.

The recipe directs first beating the evaporated milk with a hand mixer until it triples in volume, but you could also use a stand mixer's whisk attachment. This recipe is very similar to a posset — which you can serve in the lemon skins and turn into a crème brûlée.

There's one key instruction that allows this to work. Evaporated milk, one of the most underrated canned foods, must be very cold to whip. It's sometimes advised to even put it in the freezer for 30 minutes, and to chill the bowl and beaters in the refrigerator. That's because fat is what helps hold the air bubbles, and it melts when it gets warm. Evaporated milk has a lot less milk fat at 6.5% than heavy cream (more than 36%) and whipping cream (30-36%), so you need all of it to be as cold as possible. That's also why you must use full-fat evaporated milk, not low-fat or skim, and why it can take seven to nine minutes to triple.

The two types of milk used to make the lemon mousse are very similar, with just one key difference. Both are shelf-stable, with some 60% of their water removed. But, as its name indicates, the sweetened condensed milk has sugar added. It's about 45% sugar, in fact, which makes it significantly thicker than evaporated. The process of condensing the sweetened milk also gives it a caramelized flavor and yellowy-light brown color.

In addition to sweetening the mousse, the full-fat condensed milk (which you could easily make at home) is also responsible for thickening it, as its proteins coagulate when they come into contact with the lemon juice's acid. That's why you could also make this dessert with limes, but it wouldn't firm up well with oranges, since that citrus has less acid.

Once your lemon mousse is done, you have lots of options for serving it, in addition to how the recipe does in individual short glasses garnished with lemon zest and a small lemon wedge. Try topping it with a dollop of whipped cream, berries, crumbled lemon shortbread or sugar cookies, or chopped nuts like almonds, cashews, and macadamia nuts. You could also layer it with other ingredients in a parfait, such as a Lemon-Blueberry Parfait with blueberry compote, or present it in a pie or individual tarts with a graham cracker or shortbread cookie crust.