Chocolate fondant pudding

Ethan had been drooling after an episode of The Great British Bake Off and was bemoaning his lack of culinary skill.

I told him to pick something he wanted to cook from my recipe book shelves and we'd give it a try.  If it was something I'd not made before then we'd both learn.  He chose Tana Ramsey's Hot Chocolate Puddings which are chocolate fondants in all but name.

I'd never made these before and I left Ethan to it.  Hannah joined in when she arrived in from school.  They were just the way they should be: cooked on the outside and gooey in the middle.

I needed small pudding moulds.  Posh Silverwood pudding basins are £3.29 each in Steamer Trading Company

Sainsbury, on the other hand, have four non stick pudding moulds for £4.50.

You need six pudding moulds for this recipe.

Ingredients

• 250g plain chocolate (if you'd like it a little sweeter I'm sure milk chic is fine)
• 125g unsalted butter
• 3 eggs
• 2 heaped tbsp caster sugar
• 1 tbsp plain flour (I'm sure gluten free would work)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

I'm sure you can add orange zest and that would make them very tasty.

 

Method

• Grease your pudding moulds with butter.  I'm sure ramekins would work but turning them out might be trickier.
• Pop butter and choc in a bain marie (bowl over a pan of simmering water and don't let the bowl touch the water)
• In a mixer whisk the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract until frothy.  (You can do by hand if you're a sucker for punishment.)
• Sieve the flour onto egg mixture and fold in.
• When the bain marie has done its job and the butter and chocolate have melted, add it gradually to the egg mixture folding gently with a metal spoon.
• Pour the resultant mixture into the greased pots.
• Rest for a couple of hours.  The puddings, not the cook.  Now we put our puds in the fridge which I think means we could have increased the cooking time by 30 seconds.
• Preheat oven to 180°C (for fan oven) and cook for no more than ten minutes (unless you rested them in the fridge in which case ten minutes and 30 seconds should still be fine.

They are just as they should be with a gooey middle and, whilst we served with ice cream, I think clotted cream would be perfect.