Nathan asked me today if he could try making some Molten Chocolate Baby Cakes. I was just about to start staining some shelves on the back porch and wanted to get it done before the sun went down, so I popped open the recipe, helped him find a few key ingredients and left him to it. ... Only to realize, as I glanced at the recipe to give him some pointers, that what I have written there isn't really how I make the baby cakes. So leaving him to go it alone meant he "did it all wrong" (mainly by not stirring the chocolate and letting it burn... but I think if he'd had the butter in there it would have gone a little better for him). So I decided to rewrite that recipe according to the way that *I* make these mini-cakes. Hopefully next time Nathan will be able to follow these directions step-by-step and get it right the first time. (We managed to pour out the not-burned chocolate and finish up the recipe ending up with a pretty respectable mini-cake.)
Ingredients:
4 tablespoons butter (1/2 a stick)
12 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate (I aim for 8 cubes semi-sweet and 4 cubes bittersweet Baker's chocolate.)
4 large eggs
Pinch of salt
¾ cup sucanat
1/3 cup flour (I usually use ground hard red wheat.)
Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 400 F degrees.
2. Put the chocolate and butter into a small sauce pan and melt over low heat stirring very often. Once melted, remove from heat and let it sit while you mix together the next set of ingredients.
3. In a medium sized bowl, mix the eggs, salt, and sucanat until well blended. Add the flour and stir until combined.
4. Pour the chocolate mixture into the egg mixture and stir until combined, scraping the edges of the bowl to mix well.
5. Pour the batter into silicone cupcake holders. (I set these into a cupcake pan, but you can set them right on a cookie sheet as well.)
6. Cook the brownie cakes for 11 minutes. When you pull them out of the oven they might still be wiggly.
If I serve these immediately, then I give people a spoon to eat them with and we slurp up the goopy brownie cake like it's a thick chocolate pudding. If you let the brownie cakes cool until they are room temperature, they will be more like a soft brownie.
To stop the chocolate burning I find the best solution is to melt it in a bowl over a pan of boiling water. It'll still need supervision, just not quite as much...
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