STRAWBERRY JAM (Cooked)

Is it me or have there been a lot of strawberries on sale lately? It's not even strawberry season yet - nowhere near it! As a matter of fact, it was pretty scarce here for awhile in stores then all of a sudden - bang! They're everywhere! And I just keep buying them up! Now I have all these strawberries piled up in containers in my fridge. What is one to do with them all? I can only eat so many and I already have frozen ones for smoothies. Oh, I know! I'll make some strawberry jam!

I've made homemade jam before, but only the freezer kind - and that was centuries ago.
I searched quickly online for a strawberry jam recipe and found this one by BBC Good Food.

The recipe had some good tips and it called for a bit of butter - something I've never heard of being used in jam before, so I decided to give it a try. The butter helps to get rid of any 'scum' left after the boiling and skimming process.

Layered CHOCOLATE Mousse Cake with Chocolate Ganache.

Good Lord! What can I say about this chocolate-layered mousse cake? It's simply a chocolate lover's dream. It's layers of rich and moist, chocolatey goodness topped off with a chocolate ganache.

This one requires a bit of time and patience but if I can make it - anyone can because I neither have the time nor patience for these kinds of recipes but somehow I always manage to pull them off! In fact, I've pulled it off about 11 times already, no word of a lie folks! ELEVEN TIMES! Once for work, once for a birthday party, once for a neighbour... and the rest of the times for me, for the family.

I even made some chocolate molds using some more chocolate chips that were tempered earlier.

I've made 2 at a time...

... and even once drizzled one with a bit of white chocolate on top which didn't look like much but it sure tasted great! Every last bit!

What a mess of chocolaty goodness! 

For this chocolate mousse cake, I used recipes from 3 different sites (with some slight alterations of course) because I not only looked for the 'best' of each recipe but they also had to contain ingredients I had on hand (or could substitute easily):