Chocolate Molten Lava Cakes

Oh man... these are so good.  I made these as a little Valentine surprise for my husband.  My husband has a serious sweet tooth, and especially for chocolate.  He loves chocolate. He inherited his mom's sweet tooth. A while back he took me on a date to one of his favorite lunch spots in Salt Lake City called Faustina's. After lunch he said that we both had to order the chocolate lava cake for dessert.  He informed me that it was probably his favorite "restaurant dessert".  As I ate it, I wondered if I could make it. I looked at quite a few recipes, but this one that I found on allrecipes.com was by far the easiest, so I tried it.  I was worried the whole time that it was going to be a total flop.  It just seemed like there was a whole lot of room for disaster. But to my surprise, they turned out perfect, and were actually really easy to make.  My Valentine surprise was a success!  He loved them! I made them this time in my muffin tin, but I am thinking that I need to invest in some ramekins, just for this recipe.


Chocolate Molten Lava Cakes

• 1 cup unsalted butter (I used salted, but omitted the pinch of salt in the recipe)
• 8 ounces semisweet chocolate chips, or bars, cut into bite-size chunks
• 5 large eggs
• 1/2 cup sugar
• Pinch of salt
• 4 teaspoons flour 
• 8 extra-large paper muffin cups (or use regular paper muffin cups, which will make 12 cakes)
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  Melt butter and chocolate in a medium heat-proof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water; remove from heat. (I melted mine in the microwave, in 30 second intervals, stirring between each interval until it was smooth) Beat eggs, sugar and salt with a hand mixer in a medium bowl until sugar dissolves. Beat egg mixture into chocolate until smooth. Beat in flour. 
• Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Line a standard-size muffin tin (1/2 cup capacity) with 8 extra-large muffin papers (papers should extend above cups to facilitate removal). Spray muffin papers with vegetable cooking spray. Divide batter among muffin cups. Bake until batter puffs but center is not set, 8 to 10 minutes. Carefully lift cakes from tin and set on a work surface. Pull papers away from cakes and transfer cakes to dessert plates. Serve immediately.
• **Batter can be made a day ahead; return to room temperature an hour or so before baking.
• **After reading a bunch of reviews of the recipe, people said that it worked better if you made the batter at least a couple of hours ahead and let it sit.  I made mine about 2 hours before we baked it, just letting it sit on the counter.
• **I didn't use the cupcake liners when I made it.  I didn't have the large ones, so I just put the batter right in the tin.  They were a little hard to serve right out of the tin, but they worked.