… Chocolate lava cake – the softhearted …

In Hong Kong, they give this warm and gooey dessert a special name-心太軟, literally meaning “heart too soft”. I used to think that making this was hard and it required lots of techniques to cook the cake just right; once I saw a recipe that suggested to place a block of dark chocolate in the middle of the batter so that you will be guaranteed to get a flowing “heart” in the middle.

I saw this short cooking video on a newspaper site and realised that it’s not as complicated as I thought. The chef said that chocolate lava cake is actually just a cake that is not fully cooked; and chilling the batter in the fridge before baking can also prevent it from overcooking. Most of the ingredients, namely flour, sugar, eggs and butter, are what most of us would have at home. All you need for preparation is to get a bar of dark chocolate for your pantry, then go on and make this dessert at home on a random cold winter day!

p.s. I even used disposable foil cake tins to make my lava cakes..

Chocolate lava cakes

Makes 4 cakes

Ingredients

… 100g dark chocolate
… 100 butter
… 30g sugar
… 3 eggs
… 35g flour plus more to dust the baking cups or tray
… some extra oil for greasing

Instructions

1) Preheat the oven to 220*C

2) Break chocolate bar into small pieces. Places butter and chocolate in a bowl and place the bowl in a hot water bath. Stir with a egg whisk until chocolate is fully dissolved.

3)  Add in eggs and whisk until well combined

4) Add in flour and whisk again until well incorporated

5) Chill the batter in the fridge for 15 minutes

6) Grease individual aluminium cups (or muffin tray) then dust the cups/ tray with flour

7) Scoop the batter into the cups/ tray

8) Bake for 10 minutes then remove from oven immediately. Serve warm 🙂

 

You may dust a layer of icing sugar on top of the lava cakes for decoration. I didn’t because it really was a random day and I didn’t have any icing sugar in stock 😛 It will be super nice to serve the cakes with a scoop of vanilla ice cream too!

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