Go to the recipe for heart-melting chocolate pudding
I couldn’t help it. Lenny left those blocks of delicious dark chocolate sitting there in the cupboard for weeks and weeks. Late one night I just had to have a nibble.
In the end, having not quite enough 70% cocoa dark chocolate to make these molten-centred puddings wasn’t such a big problem. Hidden away in another corner of the cupboard was some plain old Cadbury’s glass-and-a-half, and it probably took the edge off the cheek-puckering bitterness of the hardcore Green & Black’s Organic.
Lenny had been dying to cook this devilish delight after we had one at the rather posh St John restaurant in Clerkenwell, London.
She found a recipe in the Observer Food Monthly, but dithered over executing it. Hence my nibbling of the ingredients. At least it got her moving when she saw the small chocolate mountain in the cupboard being steadily eroded.
As Lenny mentions in the video, the batter can be measured out into ramekins in advance and kept in the fridge uncooked, then baked immediately before serving. We made six in all, so got to enjoy them over a few evenings.
It was a pretty easy recipe, but once again the baking time had us in a muddle, mainly because of our oven’s vagaries. Overcook this one and you’ll end up with a plain, albeit very rich, chocolate brownie or sponge of sorts. This actually happened when we tried to reheat a cooked one in the microwave and zapped it for too long – but it was still delicious.
What you’re aiming for is a cakey outer layer with a heart of chocolate lava. It sounds wicked, and it is.
- Waz
Heart-melting chocolate pudding
Lenny says: We think this is drawn originally from a Nigella Lawson recipe. You’ll need 6 pudding moulds and what seems like LOT of chocolate. I’ve been caught out on a couple of occasions thinking I’d whip this one up on the spur of the moment only to find I haven’t had 350g of chocolate in the cupboard. But I usually have at least 175g, so we’ve had to make do with a half quantity. The beauty of this recipe is that you can make the mixture beforehand and divide it into the moulds, then just put it in the oven 15 minutes before you’re ready for dessert.
50g soft unsalted butter
extra butter
150g caster sugar
50g plain flour
4 eggs
1 pinch salt
1 tsp vanilla
350g best dark chocolate
Preheat the oven to 200C/390F and grease 6 pudding moulds, then line the bases with greaseproof paper (baking parchment).
Melt the chocolate in a double boiler and then let it cool slightly.
In the meantime, cream together the butter and sugar until you’ve reached a uniform consistency. If this mixture looks a bit too sugary and not buttery enough, you have have to add a bit more butter – maybe another 15g or so to make it seem a bit less grainy.
Mix the eggs in a bowl with the salt.
Gradually mix the egg mixture in with the butter mixture, and add the vanilla. Keep mixing until well combined.
Gradually stir in the flour – it will still look pretty runny at this stage.
Scrape in the cooled chocolate and give it a good stir – it will turn thicker and more elastic.
Divide the mixture among the moulds and put into the oven on a tray.
Bake for 10-12 minutes – 10 minutes if cooking immediately after mixing, a couple of minutes more if you take them from the fridge to the oven. They’re ready when the tops have puffed up and cracked a bit.
Turn out and serve hot with crème fraîche, cream or ice cream.
How to make Kung Pao Chicken
How to cook with truffles
Let the jelly roll: Swiss roll recipe from Waz’s Nana
How to roast a duck, the slow and tender way
Our roast chicken recipe: hot and fast
No-fuss fish pie
Classic bolognese
Portuguese custard tarts recipe (pasteis de nata)
About the soufflé
One chicken, three ways
Duck a l’orange
Automatic for the porridge
The great crepe debate
Whole lotta rosemary chicken
Don’t come the raw prawn
that chocolate pudding looks amazing. when i get off my deit i want to make this recipe =]
Looks really good. I think I’m going to try making that for my mum’s birthday.
Love it. You should do more shows.
What are you using to record (camera)?
TIA
Big Ed
Awesome execution guys. I’m so sad that I’ve caught up on all the back episodes, now I have to wait like all the people who knew about this earlier. Keep it up and I’ll keep watching and probably get off my butt and do a cooking show of my own someday.
You guys looked like you enjoyed it so much I’ve decided to try it out myself. Now let’s see if my friend will let me use her ramekins…
Love the chocolate pudding!
Want to try it and give it to my American boyfriend from Oregon.
Will use the “Syamoji”!
Hello again from Japan.
Glad to see some measuring cups this episode. I’m a stickler to exact measurements when baking, so the past baking episodes have been driving me insane with the estimates of the sugar and milk and stuff! However, your videos are always fun to watch and they always inspire me to cook. Good luck with future episodes. Maybe I should send you guys some measuring spoons? Hehe. Cheers.
Hey Chat,
Tell me about it!! Long have I shared your frustration at Waz’s cavalier attitude to measurements when baking (as you will see from our baking episodes, especially “Sponge Blob Square Pan†which is probably the nadir of our baking badness). So not only do we now have measuring cups, we’ve also invested in an el-cheapo set of scales so I can weigh ingredients when necessary.
And the proof of the wisdom of this new commitment to proper measurements is in the puddings – literally.
Also, we’re now starting to understand the peccadilloes of our oven. It’s quite large so I always bump the temperature up by 10 or 20 degrees (Celcius) for low-heat dishes otherwise they simply don’t cook.
I’m glad you enjoy the episodes and share my belief that when baking, a slap-dash attitude can end in a shoddy result.
Lenny
hey guys – we were having a bit of an unmotivated afternoon at work on Friday, so I suggested as a way to get through it, that we could have an afternoon coffee break and watch this episode. it had everyone in my office in stitches, especially when you showed your honest take on what everyone actually does when told to sift something… yay for friday afternoon frivolity, and i am definitely going to make some of that pud.
Love the recipe, love the measuring cups (sorry Waz, obsessive compulsives don’t handle rough estimates well), disappointed in the phantom Waz!
You guys are a sweet quirky wonderful team and my fav episodes are the ones when you’re both on camera together causing culinary mayhem (or majesty, depending on the episode). Get that guy out from behind the camera more often.
A huge fan of the show, it’s my favorite video podcast. Keep it coming!
Matthew in LA
I really like your site and am gonna be trying the spaghetti putanesco very shortly. The chocolate pudding looks like a winner also. It’s good having both of you comment as you prepare the meal. Don’t worry about the ‘umming’ its fine and natural.
YUM! Looks amazing…..thanks for the show.
Michelle
Yum yum.
Delicious sponge on the outside and motlen chocolate on the inside.
Looked really yummy guys. well done.
I’d say it’s probably a good thing that you ended putting milk chocolate in there as well. it’s probably softened that sometimes undesireable taste of dark chocolate.
xxx
Very cool, please do more. Looking forward to trying the recipe. A thin layer of crushed pecans or walnuts in the botom of the ramekan after the parchment paper goes in could be interesting.
Regards from Pennsylvania,
Charles W.
The recipe looks fantastic but, I must admit, I’m sold on your video. We have a lot of dark bittersweet chocolate around the kitchen – as my husband is a choco-holic – so this treat is next on our list. Thanks!
Why don’t you melt the chocolate in the microwave? Its much easier and a lot less messy – medium power.
are you sure those eggs are cooked sufficiently?
you should be ok with lion brand ones……just a thought. then again if you’re still alive to make the next podcast they obviosly were!
oh and leave lenny alone… i think only waz is really irritated about the umm’s!!! i don’t even notice them….
your pudding was SOOOOOOOOOOOOO nice.I will definetly make it again and again
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’ve been trying to get this damn pudding to melt in the middle for years without success.
Have finally done it thanks to your blog.
One happy mother, one happy daughter. Allbeit somewhat fatter!
absolutely love the show!
gimme more, more, more, more, MORE!
i just made the pudding. now i’m positively stuffed. that recipe serves at least twelve. baked the things too long, so the center was only soft, not liquid like yours, will be watching like a hawk next time, so no more overbaking. i served them with whipped cream and apricots cooked with calvados and lemon juice. something sour goes really well with the puddings.
i really liked the glasses you used, so one can see, how the cake looks. i will use those little ikea candle glasses the next time. the puddings should definitely be no larger than those.
gosh, i’m so FULL! i’m never gonna move agian.
okay now, the second time around they were slightly more molten in the middle, but in my imagination they are supposed to be runny like a soft boiled egg. so i gather, i used too much flour (i actually halved the recipe, since i did not have the above mentioned 11 guests to feed, and my scale isn’t very precise when it comes to small measurements like 25g of flour) and didn’t top up the butter sufficiently. maybe the oven has to be hotter, too.
but i so love this recipe, that i will keep on trying. perhaps i’ll also try seasoning the puddings with a dash or two of booze (whiskey, brandy, cointreau or amaretto or something).
Get a dial thermometer to put in your oven, then you would know what the correct temperature is.
Looking forward to the pudding being on my plate.
Can I please have the recipe i’ve been looking all over the place for one
Hi Kairo, just watch the video and write down the ingredients! If you are looking on the web I think we might have based it on a Nigella Lawson recipe.
a perfect recipe for me (NEVER leave me in a room filled with chocolate and expect it to be intact when you come back) Very nice work. And, non-sarcastic compliments on the footage quality. I do a lot of videos myself and, somehow, yours always look better than mine. Probably because of the fact that it’s hard to find a decent camera person who is available when I am.
your friend from across the pond, but wishing he was on the other side,
Die Pretty Ponies
P.S. A suggestion for future videos (don’t rant on me if you already do this, I haven’t seen some of the newer episodes on your site, since they get beamed to me from iTunes) post recipes in your description, even if they’re estimates. It’s pretty hard to make pretzels in the kitchen when your speaker is upstairs.
Fantastic video. Normal people instead of the experts that never get it wrong. I’m definitely trying this recepie tonight!
YUM.
It looks so good!
I made this tonight and it was wonderful. I had to use a food processor to turn the granulated sugar into caster. This is very much like lava cake. Yum