"Blødende" chokoladedessert

A couple of months back I purchased a set of stainless steel food rings and I've been looking for a reason and recipe to try them out.

Then I remembered that I watched a Danish bakery show last year and I'd saved a rather appealing recipe for chocolate fondant. They called it "bleeding" chocolate dessert, thus the title of this post.

Besides it was time to add another year to my count, so a perfect opportunity to try make this since I decided not to make a cake this year.

Ingredients
6 portions
60 g salted butter
60 g dark chocolate (~65%)
50 g icing sugar
50 g plain flour
0.5 tsp baking powder
2 medium eggs
25 g toasted, chopped hazelnuts
50 g Viennese nougat divided into 6 pieces
grapeseed oil for greasing the food rings
icing sugar for sprinkling

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C.
2. Chop the chocolate into small, equal sized pieces and melt together with the butter in a bain marie very carefully. Only enough to melt, but not to heat up.
3. In a bowl, stir together the flour and baking powder
4. In another, larger bowl, whisk together the eggs and icing sugar until white and fluffy.
5. Sift in the flour mixture into the egg/sugar mixture, followed by the hazelnuts and the melted chocolate/butter mixture and fold together carefully until the resulting batter is homogeneous.
   
   
6. Line a baking tray with baking paper and brush with grapeseed oil. Brush also 6 food rings (5 cm diameter, 6 cm high) and place on the baking paper.
   
   
7. Distribute the batter between the food rings, they should fill up to about three quarters, then gently push in a piece of Viennese nougat into each, so that it's hidden.
8. Bake the cakes for 6 - 7 minutes, take out from the oven and carefully push the cakes out of the food rings and onto the serving plates and sprinkle with icing sugar.
   
   

Sadly I ended up with rather light and fluffy muffin-like cakes instead:

Now there is a very simple reason for this - my food rings are 7 cm diameter and 7 cm high. This meant the batter wasn't enough. I used 4 rings and still the batter barely came up to the middle of them. The pieces of Viennese nougat were big and wouldn't hide very well inside the batter either.

I also baked for a bit longer, because the cakes took ages to rise and so they over-baked. However they were very tasty. Next time I'll get food rings of the right size.

Regular readers (if there are any) will of course know that I have a preference for unsalted butter. Also on this occasion I used it and added a pinch of salt. Not sure if it made any difference.

Another very appealing thing with this recipe is that the fondants can be frozen immediately after the batter has been poured into the food rings. As it was just me and Lundulph, I baked two of the fondants and froze two. I put a piece of baking paper at the bottom of an old ice cream box and placed two of the rings inside, before pouring in the batter. I then covered the whole thing with cling film, since the food rings were taller than the box, and into the freezer they went. The frozen fondants are baked in a pre-heated oven, straight from the freezer and for 3 minutes longer than when from room temperature. This means they can be prepared well in advance of a dinner party or if someone comes to visit unexpectedly.

Instead of the recommended home made vanilla parfait with pineapple and basil sauce, I just served with shop bought vanilla ice cream, which was rather lovely too.