Valentine’s Day Dessert: Chocolate Lava Cake

With all of this love in the air, I figured what better time is there to make a seriously decadent, delicious desert to share with my sweetie. I have actually wanted to tackle a molten chocolate lava cake for some time and haven’t had the excuse to do it. Enter Valentine’s Day!! This is a variation of a Ghirardelli recipe. I made a couple of changes for both taste and convenience that worked well for me.

Ingredients

• 6 oz 60% cocao bittersweet baking chocolate bars
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 8 Tablespoons butter (1 stick)
• 2 eggs
• 2 egg yokes
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup cake flour
• 12 ounces of unsweetened frozen raspberries, thawed
• 1/2 cup simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water melted)
• Fresh raspberries and mint leaves for garnish

Let’s get baking:

1. Melt 2 ounces of chocolate and cream in a double boiler. Whisk until smooth. Put the melted mixture in the refrigerator for about 2 hours or until firm. After the chocolate mixture has set form into 6 balls.

To make these little beauties with ease, I used a wet teaspoon (wetting in between each scoop) to drag across the bottom of my double boiler until the ball was formed. The water helped release the chocolate from the spoon without any messy sticking. After portioning out the chocolate, refrigerate until needed.
2. Prep for the cakes: preheat the oven to 400 degrees and spray six 6 ounce ramekins with baking spray. For cakes that I need to release cleanly from their baking vessel, I always use cooking spray with flour such as Baker’s Joy.

Inspiration from the Antique Store

On a few of our recent (failed) thrift store adventures, we have had a certain antique mall recommended to us. This past weekend, we finally made our way there and were really happy that we did. Some of these things I just thought were really cool or unique, but a lot will serve as inspiration for the new home office!

Lovely Glass:

On this field trip I discovered a couple...no a few new obsessions. Two of my newly found obsessions are hobnail glass and salt and pepper shakers. To spare you all some redundancies, I did not post the 4 other pictures of various salt and pepper shakers that I took and instead went with a combo of two of my new favorite things. 

Incorporating Pink In Your Decor

With all of the Valentine’s decoration on the shelves in the stores it kind of got me thinking of pink as actually being a relevant color. My husband and I have lived together for 8 years, so I stopped thinking about pink as a color option many moons ago. Every now and again I will find the inspiration to say the words: “What about pink?” to him and it’s always followed by: “What about what?!” So until I have a space that is for me and ONLY me, I will have to live vicariously through those that have been bold enough to not only rock some pink, but seriously pull it off. 

To me, choosing how you incorporate pink is all about your level of commitment to the color. So we'll start this relationship off slow and work up to a serious commitment.

1. Pillows and Linens

You've flirted with the idea of pink for a while now and you've finally worked up the courage to go on your first date. So you buy throw pillows and maybe a blanket or some other relatively inexpensive accent to see how you feel about pink.

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