It’s been a great travel week. Albany. Weston. Longmeadow. Lunenburg. Swampscott. And more to come. The common thread in all of these has been chocolate. Okay. Almost all of these. I’ve been making lots of chocolate desserts. But it’s my newest one that has people going all gooey inside. Yes, it’s the Molten Chocolate (Lave) Cake. It’s been around for a while, but I think I’ve perfected an easy and food-safe way to prepare it. Really? There’s been a non-safe problem? Okay. Here goes:
For those of you who’ve missed out on this great desert, it’s a small, individually portioned cake. It’s round, chocolate, and has a runny chocolate center. However, some recipes call for the timing of the cake to be such that you’re actually under-baking the cake, so it’s still runny in the middle. There are some problems with this, such as how do you know the eggs inside are actually baked enough? Will you take the cake’s temperature to make sure the eggs have hit their safe temperature of 145º. Yeah, that’s on everyone’s mind. And what if your oven is running a wee bit on the warm side? You won’t have a warm, lava-like center to the cake. You’ll have pumice (see what I did there?). So, what to do?
Follow my recipe. It has three extra steps. Instead of relying on luck and timing for the previous method, just melt some cream and chocolate in advance. Then cool them in the fridge. And when it’s time to bake the cakes, put the cooled chocolate into the center of the cake batter. 14 minutes later, you have a molten chocolate lava cake that takes the mystery, guesswork, and disappointment out of your dessert. But don’t take my word for it. At a dinner last Saturday, one of the guests said, “that was the best chocolate dessert. Ever.” It was, too.
And you can find it here. Happy baking!
