Chocolate Lava

It so happended 2 of my nephews came over for dinner last night and king junior asked for Chocolate Lava for dessert. It's been a few months since I last made that so to make the boy happy, Chocolate Lava for dessert it shall be!




The chocolate came oozing out when I cut through with my spoon. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients:
A.
100g dark chocolate (I used Cadboury Old Gold 70% cocoa. You can use your favourite)
100g unsalted butter (cubed at room temperature)

Melt these 2 items together using a bain marie.

B.
2 eggs
50g sugar

Beat these together till it turns white.

C.
20g flour (I used self-raising but you can use plain too. It just won't rise as much)

Method:

Heat your oven to about 180 deg C. Butter your ramekins (no ramekins? use muffin cups but make sure you butter them well so the cake can come off easily when done)

Pour melted chocolate / butter (A) into the egg mixture (B). Stir to mix well. Then stir in flour (C). Stir till well-mixed.

Pour into ramekins and bake for 10 minutes, till the outside's done and the inside's still runny. If you are using muffin cups or even paper cups, reduce the bake time to about 8 minutes or even lesser. But don't worry about over baking. I like it runny in the middle (hence the lava) but if you over bake, you will just get a super moist chocolate cake :)

You can prepare the batter ahead and just pop into the oven and then serve immediately, with ice cream, fruits (sour cherries with vanilla ice cream + cream are a good bet) or just eat it on its own.

Left overs can be stored in the fridge (in their ramekins or cups), and popped into the oven to heat for a couple of minutes the next day and turned into super moist chocolate cake.

Enjoy!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yohei has been bugging me for chocolate chip cookies so after dinner last night, we made some. Since it's Christmas, we thought we could bake some tree-shaped ones and Yohei wanted the boy & girl shapes. They didn't really turn out that well. The tree almost lost its shape after baking. Lesson? The mould must have very defined shapes so it can withstand the baking without losing its shape.


So it's back to conventional round shape for the rest of the batch :P


This is a slightly different recipe that LeeLee (Hugbear) shared on M4M. The dough turned out firmer (i.e., can shape with hands) quite unlike LeeLee's recipe where I could only use tea spoons to drop the cookies onto the baking tray. Maybe I didn't get it right with LeeLee's but anyway, here's the recipe. It's a tad sweet for me so I'd cut back on the sugars if I do use it again:

Chocolate Chip Cookies
Recipe by Connie from Kitchen Capers Forum
Yields about 40 small cookies

125g Butter
70g Castor sugar
70g Brown sugar
½ tsp Vanilla essence
1 Egg
260g Self-raising flour
130g Chocolate chips (Add more if you like more choc chips)

1. Pre-heat oven to 180C.
2. Sift the flour, set aside.
3. Beat butter, essence and sugars using mixer until smooth.
4. Add egg and beat until well combined.
5. Stir in sifted flour and the remaining ingredients.
6. Take rounded teaspoons of mixture and roll into balls.
7. Place balls about 4cm apart on slightly greased oven trays or line with baking sheet.
8. Bake in pre heated oven for 15 minutes or until browned.
9. Cool in trays for short while and transfer to wire rack for cooling.

Salvaged coffee table

Our Ikea Lack coffee table is giving way and Moobe found this just in time. He salvaged it downstairs, gave it a new coat of paint and we got 4 glass panels for the top. There! We can now put away the rickety old Lack into the storeroom haha!

Chocolate Crispies

We eneded up making chocolate crispies with half a bar of dark chocolate, some golden syrup and crushed corn flakes. Just for the fun of it, out came the cookie cutters for the cute little shapes...



can you tell what they are? haha!

Fortune cookies

Ayako & Cindy came to experiment with me on the fortune cookies that we wanted to make for Christmas eve party... alas... this is what became of it...


When we tried spread it thin on the sheet as suggested by the recipe, it burnt too fast on the edges and couldn't come off the sheet (think we forgot to oil it haha!). So Moobe added water to the batter and turned it into pancakes which Moobe & Tom polished off with chocolate icecream :P