Chocolate Volcano Cakes

By request of our house guest, I made molten chocolate cakes this weekend. No one cared about their sloppy appearance, and everyone just enjoyed the pleasure of warm, liquid chocolate in their mouths.

The recipe is from the magazine’s February 2005 issue. The intense chocolate flavour comes from both bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate, but there’s still a lot of added sugar per serving (3 tablespoons).

Since I didn’t have eight 4-ounce ramekins, I used a few smaller custard dishes. Those smaller cakes were baked through at the minimum baking time, but the cakes in the larger ramekins were very molten in the centre. I wasn’t able to cleanly turn them out onto a plate without each one bursting at the edges. There’s a small window in which the cakes are cooked enough so that they can unmold easily, while remaining liquid in the centre. I’d check every 30 seconds starting from the minimum baking time.

The make-ahead aspect of this recipe makes it very convenient to fill the ramekins ahead of time, then bake them whenever a chocolate craving strikes. It’s hard to go wrong with warm, melted chocolate. My son really enjoyed pouring unsweetened berry coulis over his portion! .