
These chocolate coffee fondant puddings are a real cheat's dessert - easy and speedy, but they look and taste great.
The secret to this melting middle pudding is not adding a liquid core to the middle of the pudding, but cooking it for only just long enough for the outside to become a sponge. The middle remains soft and oozy. You can make chocolate fondants with a more classic sponge recipe - fewer eggs and extra flour. However, this recipe, with half a dozen eggs in, is much richer and the molten middle is more unctuous and luxurious. This is a really great dinner party standby recipe, for when you need a quick pudding that won't drag you away from other hosting duties.
Ingredients
- 125g 70% cocoa solids dark chocolate, broken into small pieces
- 125g unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 3 medium eggs
- 3 medium egg yolks
- 2 tbsp coffee dissolved in 3 tbsp hot water
- 60g caster sugar
- 145g plain flour
WEIGHT CONVERTER
Method
- First grease and then line 4 metal 175ml pudding bowls with 7.5cm round of parchment paper. This prevents the base of the pudding from sticking.
- Break the chocolate into a small heatproof bowl and add the butter. Place bowl over a pan of boiling water without letting the bowl touch the water and stir gently until it has a smooth, melted consistency.
- In a large bowl, whisk the eggs, coffee, egg yolks and sugar together using an electric whisk until the mixture is pale and frothy and the whisk leaves a ribbon-like trail on the surface of the mixture. The mixture should treble in volume.
- Gently mix the melted butter and chocolate into the mixture.
- Using a spatula, fold in the flour into the mixture gently and carefully, until just combined. Use a gentle, folding movement to avoid knocking any air out of the mixture.
- Chill the puddings for 20 minute and pre-heat your oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6.
- Place the puddings onto a baking tray and cook for 7-8 minutes or until a crack just starts to form on the top of the sponge.
- Invert onto a serving plate and serve immediately.
Top tip for making chocolate coffee fondant puddings
You will need six eggs for this recipe - three whole and three yolks, which means you are left with three whites. Don't discard them - even if you don't intend to use them straight away, you can freeze them. For ease, put each on in a separate compartment of an ice cube tray. You can use them later to make meringues or coconut macaroons.
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Octavia Lillywhite is an award-winning food and lifestyle journalist with over 15 years of experience. With a passion for creating beautiful, tasty family meals that don’t use hundreds of ingredients or anything you have to source from obscure websites, she’s a champion of local and seasonal foods, using up leftovers and composting, which, she maintains, is probably the most important thing we all can do to protect the environment.