Quick and Easy Chocolate Lava Cakes Recipe

Hey, I’m Gaby, and today on Crispybake’s Kitchen, we’re making some quick and easy chocolate lava cakes. So let’s get started.

This recipe comes together in a flash.

This recipe is basically foolproof. There’s only two things that can go wrong. One, they get stuck in the ramekin. You’re not gonna let that happen because we’re gonna liberally butter them and sparingly flour them. And two, you overbake them. If you overbake your cakes, they’re just delicious little chocolate cakes. They’re not lava anymore. So I’ll show you how to make sure that doesn’t happen later on the blog

Right now I have to tell you this recipe is one of the easiest things you can do and if you wanna have people over and make it seem really impressive, a chocolate lava cake is where it’s at because there’s only a few ingredients, you have them on hand. There’s no worry about over mixing or whatever else, you’re just stirring it together and popping it into the oven. If you wanted to, you could make these lava cakes, pour them into the ramekins, cover them and leave them in your fridge for up to two days. Then, when people come over, let them come to room temperature and bake as normal. So you can do the prep work well in advance and they bake in like six minutes, so it’s very easy.

Ingredients

six ounces or 168 grams of bittersweet chocolate
half a cup or 113 grams of unsalted butter
two large room temperature eggs
two egg yolks
a quarter cup or 50 grams of granulated sugar
an eighth of a teaspoon of salt
two tablespoons of flour
butter
a teaspoon and a half of flour

Instructions

1. Preheat Oven

First off, set your oven to 450 so it is nice and hot.

2. Prepare Ramekins

Now grab six, four to five ounce ramekins, and we’re gonna butter and flour them lightly.
If you don’t know how big your ramekins are, I don’t blame you, it’s like there’s no label on them, just measure out four ounces of water or half a cup, and see if it fills it up.
Give these a nice coating of butter. Use your finger just to make sure that corner has enough butter.
Now sprinkle just a bit of flour, maybe a teaspoon and a half. Give it a good shake and make sure you coat the edge. Tap to release.
And repeat for the remaining ramekins.
Okay, my ramekins are all prepped. Let’s set those aside and chop our chocolate.

3. Prepare Double Boiler Setup

Grab a medium pot. We’re gonna fill it with about an inch and a half to two inches of water and put that over medium heat. You also want a glass bowl that fits over the pot without touching the water. This is a double boiler. And if you don’t wanna do this, you could just use your microwave. I’ll tell you how to do that later.

4. Chop Chocolate

Chop your six ounces or 168 grams of bittersweet chocolate. This is the flavor of these lava cakes. So choose a bittersweet chocolate you really like. If you’re in a pinch, you could totally use bittersweet chocolate chips for this. It will work in the recipe. I just prefer the chocolate bars. You get a higher quality of chocolate and they melt more easily. Chocolate is a nice, small, uniform pieces. You don’t want a situation where there’s a few lumps of big chocolate and you’re waiting and waiting and waiting for them to melt and the rest of your chocolate’s getting too hot, similar to preparing a silky smooth chocolate ganache. Okay. That’s nicely chopped.

5. Combine Chocolate and Butter

Transfer your chopped chocolate into your bowl. We also want half a cup or 113 grams of unsalted butter. Cut those into a few pieces.

6. Melt Chocolate and Butter

If you’re using a double boiler, place the bowl with chocolate and butter on top of the simmering water. Reduce heat to low so your water’s at a simmer, not a boil. Place your bowl on top and just be ready to mix occasionally. It’ll be a few minutes and you don’t have to stir, stir, stir. It’s really just like, come take a look, see what’s happening, stir, come take a look.
One thing about the double boiler is it’s just using steam heat. The steam is heating up this bowl that’s gently gonna melt your chocolate.

If you’re using your microwave, just use a microwave safe bowl and microwave it at 30 second increments on high power. If you’re squeamish and worried about burning your chocolate, you could totally go lower and you’ll just have more increments to melt in. Stir in between.

7. Remove from Heat

All right, this melted so quickly, so take that off heat and take it off heat because that steam will continue to heat your chocolate for no reason. Set that aside.

8. Mix Eggs and Yolks

Now, in a large bowl, we’re gonna add two large room temperature eggs. If you’re following best practices, you can crack them into a separate bowl, check for shells and continue. We also wanna have two egg yolks for added richness, so you could save those whites for something else, they freeze really well. And two yolks.

9. Add Sugar and Salt

I also want a quarter cup or 50 grams of granulated sugar. It’s really not a lot. You’re just giving enough sweetness to this because the chocolate is so rich and flavorful, you don’t wanna add so much sugar that it takes away from that flavor, which is a thing. I also want une soupsante sale or an eighth of a teaspoon of salt just for a little bit of contrast.

10. Beat Eggs and Sugar

I’m using a hand mixer for this because there really isn’t that much volume in my bowl and stand mixers do not like that. So use a hand mixer or you can even mix this by hand. I’m beating this on medium speed until it’s thicker and a nice beautiful pale yellow color. I would not wanna do this by hand, but you can, you can. All right, a little bit of mixing later and you can see I’ve thickened my mixture. It’s a lighter yellow color and we’re ready for our next step.

11. Add Chocolate Mixture to Eggs

We’re gonna add this amazing chocolate mixture to the eggs. Pour that in and I will point out the chocolate cooled down a bit while we were mixing the eggs. If you added the hot chocolate right into the eggs without waiting, there’s a chance the eggs could kind of curdle a bit. So I would just make sure you give it a couple of minutes to cool down.

12. Add Flour

To hold this cake together, I want a whopping two tablespoons of flour. So little, it’s crazy. I’m gonna sift this in as I mix just to make sure there’s no lumping happening. Really gives you a nice even distribution of flour. Mix that together until it’s well combined and you see no streaks and also scrape the bowl down with your spatula while you’re at it. Okay. Just like that, our batter is totally done. It was so easy.

13. Divide Batter Into Ramekins

Grab your ramekins and we’re gonna divide this up without spilling any, if all. I slightly overfilled my five ramekins. One of them’s gonna be empty, but that’s totally fine. You don’t have to have six slightly smaller cakes. You could have five slightly larger ones. You might just add 30 seconds or so of bake time.

14. Bake Lava Cakes

These guys are ready to go into the oven at 450, for six to eight minutes. I’m gonna show you what it looks like when they’re ready because that is the most crucial part. You do not wanna over bake these and you also don’t wanna bake them in advance. Bake them just as you’re ready to serve them. So get your dessert plates out, pop these into the oven and we’ll be right back.

15. Cool and Unmold

I bake these cakes for seven minutes because there was a little bit of extra batter and I want you to see, straight out of the oven, they have just a little bit of jiggle and you can see the edges are set. You’re gonna let these cool in the ramekin for one minute.

16. Serve and Garnish

Grab your dessert plate, place it over the top and invert it. Think of thoughts. Okay, you can use a little bit of an oomph to dislodge it. Okay, that is nice and molten on top and I’m not worried about the center being totally molten because top it with some powdered sugar, garnish with some raspberries and it’s ready for a bite.

Pure decadence. That is so rich, chocolatey, fudgy, warm and amazing. You just can’t stop smiling when you eat it.

I hope you get a chance to make this recipe, and if you like other chocolate desserts, you might also enjoy my easy fluffy fudgy chocolate cupcakes.

For me, this dessert is super nostalgic because when I was in high school, there were a couple of restaurants you could go to and like the fancy thing to order was a chocolate lava cake. I had no idea it was such an easy recipe to make or I would have made it myself. There’s some debate for when this recipe came to the US and who invented it. It probably came from France probably a while ago, but it became popularized here in the 80s and 90s. Restaurants love putting chocolate lava cakes on the menu because the batter is super easy. You can make them way ahead of time and then you just bake them off as the customers order them and they bake off in an instance and they’re super dramatic and they seem very impressive and they’re delicious, but it’s very easy.

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