Melt In The Middle Chocolate Pudding Inspired By Ben Ebbrell

This is the kind of pudding that dreams are made of. Seriously, ANY TIME I see a chocolate fondant on a menu I just have to pick it.

I mean, why wouldn’t you? They’re:

Warm

Oozy

Dark

Melty

Rich

Gooey

That’s quite a list of wonderful things!

If you’ve ever watched Masterchef, you’ll have been led to believe that these little puddings are really tricky to master, with contestant after contestant failing to pull one out of the oven with the crucial melty middle still oozing out.

A Melt in the Middle Chocolate Pudding without a melty middle? Well, it’s just a cake.

Don’t get me wrong – a chocolate cake is no bad thing. In fact, the only time I would be disappointed to meet a chocolate cake would be when I was expecting a melty middle chocolate cake!

BUT I have an important public interest announcement! These are actually dead easy to make once you know how!

Mastering these babies is so simple that you’ll wish you’d given it a go earlier. No longer just a treat after a fancy dinner, if you serve these at a party you can expect to be labelled an absolute domestic goddess for the rest of your life!

Never tell anyone they were easy, just accept the applause, hugs, and smile graciously. I recommend smiling, and then just lightly wiping your brow for dramatic effect. This is not my first rodeo.

I love using the brown sugar as it adds a delicious almost caramel-ly flavour to the pudding which I love, but equally don’t rush out to buy some if you have caster sugar, as that works perfectly well too. I always like to add a little coffee to my chocolate cakes, of any kind, as I think it just adds another level to the flavour and I promise you can’t taste the coffee, it just secretly works a little magic.

The magic of these puddings is that you can make them the day ahead, and just pop them in the fridge. When you are ready for them, put them in the oven straight from the fridge and just add another 2 minutes to the cooking time. Perfect for dinner parties.

Author: Margie

Ingredients

Scale

100g dark chocolate

100g butter

100g soft brown sugar

2 eggs

35g flour

½ teaspoon instant coffee

tiny pinch of salt

splash of vanilla extract

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 200C

Grease 4 little pudding basins. I like these ones

Pop a circle of greaseproof paper in the bottom to ensure they don’t stick

Melt the butter and chocolate together. I prefer doing this in the microwave but a bain marie is also good – more faff, but still good.

Once melted, add the eggs and sugar

Stir in the flour, coffee, vanilla, and salt

Pour into the basins and cook for 10-15 minutes. Important: all ovens vary so it is VERY important to check them at 10 mins and then every minute thereafter until you think they are done. They are done when the sides are ever so sightly coming away from the sides but you can still see that it isn’t set in the middle.

Serve with a dollop of sour cream / creme fraiche / double cream. Or all of the above. These are also gorgeous with a handful of raspberries to cut through the richness of the chocolate.

Doing a practice round before your guests arrive is always a good idea as you will feel much more relaxed (and you’ll get extra puds all to yourself!)

These also freeze beautifully and can also be kept in the fridge for 2 days (uncooked). To cook from chilled simply add another 2 mins to your cooking time (remember to keep checking them). To cook from frozen simply add another 8-10 mins to the cooking time. This recipe doubles up beautifully so you could always prepare more than you need and bung the extras in the freezer…for well, emergencies.