Tuesdays With Dorie: Gooey Chocolate Cake

I have been waiting for weeks to join TWD! I have been drooling over all the tasty baked goods that show up in my Google Reader each Tuesday. A couple of things had to happen before I could join, well actually 3 things. 1) Lent needed to be over so I could bake for personal pleasure again. 2) I needed to acquire the cookbook Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan and 3) I needed to get to a point where I didn’t lose my cool around homemade baked goods (i.e. stuff them all in my face while my husband wasn’t looking.) All three things have come to pass so I am jumping right in!

This week’s challenge was a gooey chocolate cake. For whatever reason mine didn’t turn out gooey, molten, or lava-like, but they were still delicious! I think my oven cooks hot and I shouldn’t have baked these the full 13 minutes. I can’t wait to see what others have done with the recipe! Also, I have to give credit to my sister for helping me whip these up on Friday night while she was over. She brought over her double-boiler which was really helpful! We all had our cake with ice cream, except for Tyler, who never has ice cream or coolwhip with dessert. He is a wacky purist I suppose. The only way these cakes could be any more delicious would be with some kind of raspberry sauce, mmmmm. Maybe next time.

Gooey Chocolate Cakes (from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours pp. 261-262)

Ingredients:

1/3 cup all purpose flour
3 T unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 t salt
5 oz bittersweet chocolate (4 oz coarsely chopped, 1 oz finely chopped)
1 stick unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces
2 large eggs, at room temp
1 large egg yolk, at room temp
6 T sugar

Directions:

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Butter (or spray) 6 cups of a regular-size muffin pan, preferably a disposable aluminum foil pan, dust the insides with flour and tap out the excess. Put the muffin pan on a baking sheet.

Sift the flour, cocoa, and salt together.

Set a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of gently simmering water (we used a double boiler), put the coarsely chopped chocolate and the butter in the bowl and stir occasionally over the simmering water just until they are melted–you don’t want them to get so hot that the butter separates. Remove the bowl from the pan of water.

In a large bowl, whisk the eggs and yolk until homogenous. Add the sugar and whisk until well blended, about 2 minutes. Add the dry ingredients and, still using the whisk, stir (don’t beat) them into the eggs. Little by little, and using a light hand, stir in the melted chocolate and butter. Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups and sprinkle the finely chopped chocolate over the batter.

Bake the cakes for 13 minutes. Transfer them, still on teh baking sheet, to a rack to cool for 3 minutes. (There is no way to test that these cakes are properly baked, because the inside remains liquid.)

Line a cutting board with a silicone baking mat or parchment or wax paper, and, after the 3 minute rest, unmold the cakes onto the board. Use a wide metal spatula to life the cakes onto dessert plates.