My Inspired Home: 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.

3. To Make the cake: melt 4 ounces of chocolate and butter in a double boiler, whisking until smooth. Set aside to cool while you make the rest of the batter. With an electric mixer, whisk eggs, yokes, sugar and vanilla on high speed for about 5 minutes or until you’ve reached cake batter consistency (see picture below).

4. Fold melted chocolate mixture and flour (if you don’t have cake flour on hand or don’t want to buy a whole bag only to use 1/4 cup, check out my emergency substitutions guide, I used the substitution ingredients for the cakes that are in these pictures) into egg mixture until just combined. Spoon batter into greased ramekins (they should be about two-thirds full). Place a chocolate ball into the center of each ramekin.
5. Bake on a cookie sheet about 15 minutes or until cake is firm to the touch.

5. Cool the cakes for about 5 minutes in the ramekins. Run a sharp knife around the edges of each cake and invert onto a plate. You should only have to give the bottom of the ramekins a couple of taps if the cake doesn’t fall out immediately.
6. For the Puree, blend the raspberries and simple syrup in a blender until perfectly smooth. I recommend not adding all of the simple syrup at one time so that you can choose the thickness that you desire. I used the full 1/2 cup and it was only slightly thick. After blending to your desired thickness, double strain the puree through a sieve. You’ll need to press the puree through the strainer with a large spoon to expedite this process.

7. Let’s Garnish! I spooned about a Tablespoon and a half of the puree onto the top of the cake and let it spill down the sides, if you want to get fancy you can drizzle a bit around the perimeter of the cake, and then add your raspberries and the mint.