As promised!

Good morning! Hope you all are having a fine start to your day.

Okay, now to finally divulge the details of my horrendous first attempt at chocolate lava cake. Why was it horrendous? It was not horrendous in taste, but texture, because my "cake" was actually nothing short of a chocolate soup. I kid you not! Literally, soup!

After pondering for weeks (again, I kid you not), I finally figured out where I made some (pretty major) blunders. First, the unit of chocolate in the recipe is in ounces, and unfortunately, this term is foreign territory for me. [ How many people have a scale in their kitchen for measuring food, I ask you? Not many, I can say with almost 99% certainty. I like to use measuring cups. There is no ambiguity in them, they are very economical, and not least of all, they're universal! Okay, I should stop. I'm just looking to put the blame on someone else. The errors were purely my fault :P ] 

So anyway, without a kitchen scale, I had to resort to looking for the metric equivalent on Google. I believe I used approximately 1.5 cups of chocolate discs (same thing as chocolate chips, only they're shaped as discs). Also, the recipe stated the oven temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius, and usually when recipes do that, the Celsius value is stated in brackets. This particular recipe did it the other way around, and had the Fahrenheit in the brackets, like such "200 C (400 F)". Not noticing the units, I baked at 200 F for 20 minutes, when I was only supposed to bake for 12 minutes. When I removed the "cakes" from the oven, and realized in dismay what they looked like, I added a couple of heaping spoonfuls of flour in an act of desperation [ who would want to throw out chocolate ]? I baked for yet another 5 minutes. The result was very "flour-y" cakes, not only in texture, but also in taste! Yes, the taste of the flour was very apparent. So alas, I had no choice but to throw them out :(

For my second attempt, my coworker so happened to have given me a bar of chocolate for Valentine's Day, and I had noticed on the wrapper that it is 3.5 ounces [ ounces ]! So, as mentioned in my previous blog, I scaled down the recipe, and baked at the correct temperature of 400 F, and the cooking time of 12 minutes was perfecto. I really recommend you give it a try :)

-Kitchen Girl