Gluten-Free Chocolate Lava Cakes + Video
Passover is in two days. It's time to get your gluten-free dessert game on. Mine is pretty strong, if I do say so myself.
Gluten-free chocolate lava cakes. That taste exactly the same as lava cakes made with flour. And lava cakes you get at fancy restaurants for dessert.
Okay, fine, not exactly the same. Better.
I'm not kidding. These molten chocolate lava cakes are incredible. And taste just like the ones at restaurants. And don't contain any flour in them. And also, I made a video tutorial to show you how it's done:
You can also watch it on Youtube.
You know the feeling. The molten chocolate lava cake feeling.
You're at a restaurant. A warm lava cake is brought to your table for dessert. The plate is garnished with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, confectioner's sugar, a mint leave, and perhaps some chocolate syrup.
You insert your spoon into the lava cake. It sinks right into the gooey mass. Immediately, hot, melting chocolate batter starts oozing out. You hurriedly add ice cream to your spoon filled with oozing chocolate lava cake and place the spoon into your mouth. The room explodes.
Or at least your taste buds do. The rich, chocolaty, melty, gooey lava cake combined with the cold vanilla ice cream is almost too much for your taste buds to handle. It's a party in your mouth. Why are there no streamers hanging?
Until I made my first lava cake, I thought it was a complicated and time-consuming dessert to create. MISCONCEPTION. Ignorance was not bliss in this situation. Because if I had only known how simple it was to prepare this dessert, I wouldn't have missed out on years of homemade chocolate lava cakes.
Lava cakes are literally one of the easiest desserts you can make. If you can make a simple chocolate cake, you can make a lava cake. Only lava cakes take 12 minutes to bake, whereas a chocolate cake can take upwards of 60 minutes. So lava cakes win.
If you watched my video, you saw how quick and easy it was to make these cakes. If you didn't, why didn't you. But also, I'll tell you. Melt chocolate and butter together (a microwave works if you're wary of a double boiler), whisk your sugar, vanilla, and salt right into the same bowl, whisk in your eggs and egg yolks, and then stir in your flour.
Or in this case, your almond meal. So that the lava cakes are Kosher for Passover. Divide the batter into your prepared ramekins, bake the cakes for 12-13 minutes, flip them out of the molds, and you're done.
The melting batter magic happens all by itself. Because lava cakes are basically under baked chocolate cakes. Much richer, gooier, tastier under baked chocolate cakes. That are heavy on the eggs and butter and chocolate and light on the flour. And non-existent on the leavening agents.
Which means you can prepare these lava cakes a day in advance. Unlike a regular cake batter which contains baking soda and/or baking powder and thus has to be baked right away, the only leavening agents in a lava cake are the eggs.
So you can prepare the ramekins with the batter in them, place them in the fridge overnight, and bake the cakes 15 minutes before you're ready to serve them.
Convenient. And ready exactly when you're ready to ingest them. Lava cakes, you amazing things, you.
I hope these gluten-free chocolate lava cakes will make Passover, and life in general, more exciting for you.
Do feel free to make these cakes all year round. With almond meal or with flour. Both yield the same results. The results being warm, gooey, rich, creamy, soft chocolate lava cakes with a melty, chocolaty centers and a slightly crispy outer crusts and happy hearts and souls.
Happy Passover to my fellow celebrators!
Gluten-free chocolate lava cakes
Yield: 8 cakes
8 oz. bittersweet chocolate (I used 70%)
8 oz. (2 sticks) butter
1 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 whole eggs + 4 egg yolks
2 oz. (1/2 cup packed) almond meal (may substitute 2 oz. all purpose flour)
Preheat oven to 400 F. Grease 8 ramekins and then coat them in sugar (as opposed to flour to keep them gluten-free).
Melt the chocolate and butter together in the microwave or over a double boiler.
Whisk the sugar, vanilla extract, and salt into the melted chocolate mixture until smooth. Next, whisk in the eggs and egg yolks vigorously. Stir in the almond meal last.
Divide batter into ramekins evenly (can be filled till almost the top). Bake cakes for 12-14 minutes, or until the edges are set but the center is still soft and slightly jiggly.
Let lava cakes cool two minutes. Then, insert a knife around the edges of the cakes to ease them out of the ramekins. Flip over onto serving plate and serve right away. (Alternatively, don't flip the cakes out and serve them directly in the ramekins.)
*Note: you can prepare the lava cakes up to a day in advance by placing the portioned, unbaked lava cakes covered in the fridge until ready to be baked.
On a completely unrelated note, how rude:
photo from dump a day dot com
