Warm Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce

Why This Recipe Works

Our ideal semifreddo recipe, which is something of a cross between a custard and ice cream, features a light vanilla mousse speckled with crushed amaretti cookies and nuts and frozen in a loaf-shaped mold, served in thick slices with a pot of bittersweet chocolate sauce for drizzling. Touched by the warm sauce, the semifreddo immediately begins to melt, blurring the line between cool, airy cream and smooth, rich chocolate. To develop this recipe, we started with a cooked, or Italian, meringue, in which a hot sugar syrup is poured into the egg whites as they are beaten. Because the syrup cooks the whites, the meringue becomes more stable and, we hoped, better equipped to stand up to the addition of other ingredients. This did in fact prove to be the case, and so we went on to make several different versions of the dessert as well as a bittersweet chocolate sauce to pour over it.