Baking Saga: Chocolate Lava Cakes
Last summer, a very good friend of mine gave me a stash of Valrhona baking chocolate. In a moment of brilliance, we decided that we ought to "test" it out by making chocolate lava cakes. And...
... they were pretty much a disaster. Some of the butter separated out and floated on top; the cake baked all the way through and did not so much have any sort of lava center; and while they tasted okay, the texture was off and they weren't anything approaching amazing. In large part this may have been because we made some questionable modifications to the recipe (... we may or may not have had some wine before we started, which may or may not have impaired the baking judgement...), but I also think the recipe wasn't very good to begin with. All in all, not one of my baking triumphs (thought it certainly was fun, I won't deny that!), and I've been on the lookout for a good chocolate lava cake recipe since.
About four weeks ago, though, one of my friends here had a ton of people over for dinner and made rather successful lava cakes for dessert, so I asked for the recepe afterward. It turns out it was the one from the Ghirardelli website, which is a little different than most I've seen because it achieves the "lava" center not by simply under-cooking the center of the cake (as many of the recipes I've found online do) but instead by putting a ball of chocolate ganache (cream + chocolate) in the middle of the batter before baking. The ganache melts but does not solidify since it doesn't have any egg or flour in it.
I've been meaning to try making them ever since, but my friend Sarah really wanted to help out, and she's been out of town the past few weekends, so today was the first chance we've had. We ate them with strawberries (from the farmer's market) and vanilla ice cream, but I bet they'd be excellent with some sort of creme anglaise or something. The only mod I made was to add a dash of salt, and definitely use bittersweet chocolate (I used Scharffen Berger) rather than just semisweet. I didn't try it this time around, but I bet they'd also be excellent with a bit of cayenne added to the ganache!
Sorry, no pics of the melty insides; they were devoured much too quickly for that. But rest assured that they were really quite wonderful, and provided just the chocolate fix we wanted :-D
(And it just occurred to me yesterday, but I think (?) the friend who was my partner in crime for the baking disaster described above has a birthday coming up this week. So I suppose it's somehow appropriate to post this today; I don't know if you ever read this, but if you do, happy birthday. I'm eating chocolate in your honor :-)
... they were pretty much a disaster. Some of the butter separated out and floated on top; the cake baked all the way through and did not so much have any sort of lava center; and while they tasted okay, the texture was off and they weren't anything approaching amazing. In large part this may have been because we made some questionable modifications to the recipe (... we may or may not have had some wine before we started, which may or may not have impaired the baking judgement...), but I also think the recipe wasn't very good to begin with. All in all, not one of my baking triumphs (thought it certainly was fun, I won't deny that!), and I've been on the lookout for a good chocolate lava cake recipe since.
About four weeks ago, though, one of my friends here had a ton of people over for dinner and made rather successful lava cakes for dessert, so I asked for the recepe afterward. It turns out it was the one from the Ghirardelli website, which is a little different than most I've seen because it achieves the "lava" center not by simply under-cooking the center of the cake (as many of the recipes I've found online do) but instead by putting a ball of chocolate ganache (cream + chocolate) in the middle of the batter before baking. The ganache melts but does not solidify since it doesn't have any egg or flour in it.
I've been meaning to try making them ever since, but my friend Sarah really wanted to help out, and she's been out of town the past few weekends, so today was the first chance we've had. We ate them with strawberries (from the farmer's market) and vanilla ice cream, but I bet they'd be excellent with some sort of creme anglaise or something. The only mod I made was to add a dash of salt, and definitely use bittersweet chocolate (I used Scharffen Berger) rather than just semisweet. I didn't try it this time around, but I bet they'd also be excellent with a bit of cayenne added to the ganache!
Sorry, no pics of the melty insides; they were devoured much too quickly for that. But rest assured that they were really quite wonderful, and provided just the chocolate fix we wanted :-D
(And it just occurred to me yesterday, but I think (?) the friend who was my partner in crime for the baking disaster described above has a birthday coming up this week. So I suppose it's somehow appropriate to post this today; I don't know if you ever read this, but if you do, happy birthday. I'm eating chocolate in your honor :-)