Recipes Discovered

Little Hot Chocolate Cake Recipe

I bought a book called Chocolate: Discovering, Exploring, Enjoying at Williams and Sonoma recently. It’s a small book, but has a lot of interesting facts about the history chocolate, different types of chocolate, how it’s made and how best to enjoy it. There are a few recipes in the back, and one of them is for Little Hot Chocolate Cakes, also know as molten chocolate cake or chocolate lava cake. It’s not the simplest recipe, but the picture (featured on the cover) makes it look really good. The recipe starts by beating eggs, egg yolks and sugar with a hand held mixer for 10 to 15 minutes. I don’t know why it has to be a hand mixer, that seems to add a lot of work, but that’s what I did. It took about 12 minutes for the mixture to turn pale yellow, thick and very frothy. I cheated and had Seth’s mix the eggs though, while I melted the chocolate and butter over a double boiler. I could only find 60% chocolate, so that’s what I ended up using. After the chocolate melted and the eggs were beat, I added the egg mixture to the melted chocolate a little bit at a time. I always thought you were supposed to add the hot mixture to the eggs to tempur them, but this recipe doesn’t say to do that. The eggs didn’t curdle though, so I guess adding them a little bit at a time worked. >>After all the egg mixture was blended with the chocolate, I added flour and cocoa powder and gentle folded everything together. Then I spooned the batter into small, buttered ramekins(4 3/4 ounce), put them on a baking sheet, and placed them in a 350 degree oven. They only baked for 10 minutes before they puffed up and were firm to the touch. I ran a knife around the outside, but they were fairly loose to begin with. To plate them, I put a plate upside down over the ramekin and then flipped it over and pulled the ramekin off. They turned out perfectly. I didn’t dust them with cocoa powder, but I did serve them with ice cream. The outside was like a dense cake, but the inside was pure liquid chocolate. These little cakes were so delicious and chocolately, it was outrageous. It doesn’t get any better than rich chocolate and ice cream. I can only image what they would taste like if I had used to 70% chocolate.