Chocolate Lava Cake
- Ready In:
- 1hr
- Ingredients:
- 10
- Yields:
-
10 lava cakes
ingredients
-
Cake Batter
- 14 ounces dark semi-sweet chocolate
- 8 ounces butter
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 6 eggs, total 3 separated and at room temperature
- 3 ounces cake flour, sifted
- 1⁄4 teaspoon cream of tartar
- 4 ounces sugar
-
Lava Centers
- 4 ounces dark semi-sweet chocolate
- 3 ounces heavy cream
- 2 teaspoons butter
directions
- For lava centers: Chop chocolate into pieces and put into a metal bowl.
- Heat cream and pour over chocolate; whisk until smooth. Add butter and whisk until fully incorporated.
- Place mixture in fridge to cool until a frosting-like texture is reached, whisking periodically.
- With a spoon or melon-baller, make cherry-sized mounds on a cookie sheet and freeze until ready to use.
- For cake batter: Chop chocolate into pieces. Place on top of a double-boiler with butter and melt.
- Remove from heat and add vanilla extract and 3 egg yolks. Whisk together until mixture is smooth.
- Add well-sifted flour and gently incorporate into chocolate mixture.
- Place 3 egg whites, salt, and cream of tartar into a clean bowl. Whisk until whites form soft peaks. Continue to whisk while slowly sprinkling in the sugar.
- Using a rubber spatula, carefully the egg white mixture into the chocolate mixture, adding a third at a time.
- Spoon batter into large non-stick muffin tins, filling 3/4 full. (Ramekins may be used as well; butter insides and dust with cocoa first).
- Push a lava center into the center of each little cake.
- Bake at 375F for 15 minutes. DO NOT OVER-BAKE!
- Remove from oven, wait 5 minutes, then carefully unmold onto wire rack to cool.
- Serve cakes warm. If you need to reheat, simply microwave for 30 seconds.
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RECIPE SUBMITTED BY
<p>I live in beautiful western Manitoba, Canada. I'm a wife and stay-at-home mom with 2 daughters, Peanut (who turned 7 at the end of January) and Fidget (who will turn 5 in the middle of June) and a husband whom I call The Bushman, who's motto, lucky for me, is I'll try anything once! I'm a Mennonite by heritage as well as faith. I'm a born again Christian and we belong to a small Evangelical Mennonite country church where The Bushman and I are fairly involved. The church is made up largely of family groups -- most are related somehow. That's actually a Mennonite pastime, finding out how everyone's related to each other. If we're not directly related, we'll find a connection somehow -- your third cousin's wife's brother is for SURE my mother's father's sister-in-law's nephew!! See, isn't it amazing how small this world really is?! For fun, I enjoy photography -- my favourite subjects are sunsets, cloud formations, my girls, and nature close-ups -- reading, (John Grisham, Frederick Forsythe, Robert Ludlum, and Clive Cussler are my favourite authors), playing piano, and going for nice long walks, either first thing in the morning or towards sunset. I've even learned to enjoy it in the dead of winter, when I have no choice but to walk in semi-darkness. For those of you who've never experienced a Manitoba winter (lucky you!), 'the dead of winter' includes pretty much all of December, January, and February!! And up here, our shortest days of the year have only 7 hours of daylight, so if it's cloudy, well, it feels like no daylight at all! It's my favourite time to plan my day, pray, and daydream about what might happen if I'd ever actually buy a lottery ticket and win!! I love cooking -- baking not so much (mostly because it's not essential to survival and if there's baking in the house, that's all we eat!!) -- and reading recipe books is a favourite pastime of mine. I love the Company's Coming series of cookbooks, but my favourite is Taste of Home magazine. Since buying a premium membership here though, I've decided to let my subscription run out. I'll miss it, but I've decided there's really no need for it, since all the best recipes in the world eventually end up here!!</p>