Hot Chocolate Pudding Cake

I thought I had made the Hot Chocolate Pudding Cake from Baked Occasions before, but making it "again" this week for Baked Sunday Mornings, I realized I must be wrong. I would have remembered this crazy pudding-cake hybrid. It combines the best of pudding - silky smooth texture and pure flavor - with a rich and moist dark chocolate-studded cake. It's also really simple to make, no mixer required, pretty standard ingredients, just a few bowls, and a saucepan+pot in which to melt butter and chocolate. 

This pudding cake is a bit like those magic cakes that were trending all over social media earlier this year. You melt-whisk-fold your way to a "typical" cake batter, then cover that batter with dark chocolate chunks, a layer of cocoa-laced sugar (aka hot cocoa mix), then pour boiling "coffee" over top of everything. As the cake bakes, the cocoa-sugar-coffee forms a luscious layer of chocolate pudding on the bottom of the pan with the regular cake part sitting on top. As it cooks, and even once it's out of the oven, the cake looks a little like a molten volcano with rolling waves of pudding rippling the surface of the cake. Matt and Renato's hot chocolate pudding cake is the kind of cake that goes beautifully with ice cream, but my chocolate-loving friends preferred it unadultered: "Why mess with perfection?" It's delicious warm, but also outstanding cold from the fridge. It's not half bad at room temperature either...

As Baked recipes go, this hot chocolate pudding cake is quite forgiving. I didn't have canola oil so I used olive oil instead. I didn't have espresso powder, so I simply made a cup and a quarter-ish* of strong coffee and used it straightaway to pour over the sugared cake. [Since basically the instant espresso powder is acting in place of coffee as a way of pulling out even more chocolate notes from this cake.] No 8-by-8 cake pan? No problem. I baked this for 41 minutes in a 5.5-by-7.5 inch rectangular Pyrex. [Thus the smaller volume of liquid*, I was worried about overflowing the pan.] My only major suggestion is to make sure you butter or grease your pan especially well, otherwise you may wind up with chocolate chunks stuck to the bottom like I did. I feel this way about all the Baked cakes - butter the pan with more butter than you think necessary, otherwise tragedy awaits in the form of stuck cake. Or in this case, stuck chocolate chips, which I just scraped off with a spoon and ate straight from the pan.

Head over to Baked Sunday Mornings for the recipe and to see what the other bakers thought of this marvelous, ultra-chocolatey beast of a cake.