Molten Chocolate Cake

a.k.a Chocolate Lava Cake. This is an extremely quick and easy dessert to make. What's even better is that it's one of those recipes that work for small family, i.e. of size 2. Or if you live by yourself, you can make the batter, bake one, and keep the other for the following day. One last thing, it's sure to please. Well, if a non-vegan is not pleased, you definitely need to check if that person needs Zoloft (or something along that line) instead!

INGREDIENTS:

2 servings

1 egg

1 egg yolk

2 oz chopped good bittersweet chocolate*

2 Tsp sugar

2 Tsp butter, and more softened butter

1 Tsp all-purpose flour

Cocoa powder

Pinch of fine sea salt

*If you can afford, use something like Valrhona. I can't so I settle for Callebaut. 

METHOD:

Preheat the oven to 450ºF.

Mix the flour and salt together.

Grease 2 5- to 6-oz (or 3 4-oz ones)ramekins with softened butter. (Greasing well will ensure your cakes invert easily later.) Coat with the cocoa powder, tap out the excess. You could also use good old all-purpose flour but the cakes will have some white flour spots later. If you are going to sprinkle powdered sugar over your cakes anyway then it really doesn't matter.

In a medium bowl over simmering water, melt the chocolate and butter. Let cool.

In another medium bowl, whisk the egg and egg yolk and sugar until the mixture just turns pale. Add the melted chocolate and butter, mix well. Fold in the flour.

Divide the batter equally between the ramekins. Place the ramekins on a baking sheet and bake for 8-9 minutes, until the outside third is set but the middle two-thirds is still jiggly. You might have to experiment with your oven temperature and baking time as oven temperatures can vary greatly and 30s more could wreck the whole thing. Well, that's an exaggeration, you will still have some chocolate cakes. What you won't get is the oozing goodness. 

Cool the ramekins on a rack for a few minutes. Invert onto plates and serve immediately with vanilla ice cream and some berries, or just powdered sugar, or whatever you fancy. If you do decide to serve with ice cream, let the cake cool down a bit more or it will melt your ice cream very very quickly. But it's hard to wait. I can never be patient enough to wait (hence the messy picture below) knowing what I will get spooning into that small little cake!

Here's what I had:

I served mine over a candied orange wheel and raspberry sauce, topped with ice cream. And please please pardon the terrible sugar decoration, it was a rushed experiment.

The batter can be kept in the refrigerator for up to a day. In that case, let them cool down to room temperature before baking.

Dry Wonton Mee

I can't remember when I first ate this dish. It's probably during my third year in Singapore (we were so poor my friends and I rarely ever ate out during our first two years there). I think I ate it at my school's canteen. NJC's canteen had a few of my favorite dishes and I always got them whenever I managed to get down quickly enough before a long line formed. The left most store served fried hokkien mee on Tuesdays and Thursdays (I think), and the right most store had briyani (whose name I asked my roommate multiple times before I got it) on Fridays. Of course there's always yong tau foo with its forever long line and the noodles store where I could get wonton mee, or sometimes mee pok. 

The concept of dry wonton noodles had been foreign to me. There are places in my hometown that serve wonton noodles too but they were always the soupy type, perhaps because the weather was always cool enough for a bowl of piping hot noodles. Well, I don't know since when this has been one of my favorite dishes to eat. Now, I make it sometimes, trying to duplicate the taste but sometimes I'm more successful than others. And knowing me, when I felt that it's close enough, I was too lazy to put down the list of ingredients that I put in and so I later forgot about it. Those were pre-this-blog days of course. Now, I try to pay attention to what I use, and how much so that I could share with you all. (I'm amazed by my generosity sometimes.)

So here it is:

INGREDIENTS:

2 servings 

2 bundles of wonton noodles (I particularly like one brand that's only sold at a Viet grocery store here) 

12 round wonton wrappers*

6 large shrimps (or about 1/2 per wonton)

3 oz ground pork

2 Tsp chopped chives

1 large clove of garlic, finely chopped

1 Tsp finely diced fresh water chestnuts (or jicama)

1.5 Tsp soy paste**

1 tsp corn starch

Baby bok choy

2.5 cups homemade (or low-sodium) chicken broth

Spring onion, for garnish

2 Tsp vegetable oil

2 tsp ketchup

Hot sauce (to taste)

3 tsp soy sauce

1 tsp oyster sauce

1 tsp soy paste

*These are sold in hundreds (I think) so I normally freeze them and put them out to thaw about 1.5h before I wrap them. You might want to freeze them in small portions if you don't have a family of 10.

**You might wonder if soy sauce is a good substitute. Well, I think soy paste works better because it's less liquidy, and also tastes different.

METHOD:

Clean the shrimps, chop into small pieces, mix with the corn starch and some soy paste. Set aside. At this point, you probably wonder why corn starch is used here. Well, this is how my friend's mom has always made her wontons. Later on, I read somewhere that the corn starch creates a high pH environment which gives the shrimps the "springy" feel just like when you order them at restaurants. Neat huh?

Mix the ground pork, chopped water chestnuts, chives, and garlic. Add freshly ground black pepper and the remaining soy paste. Mix well. 

Scoop about a Tsp of the pork mixture onto a wonton wrapper, add shrimps, wet the edge with water and seal from one side to the other, make sure no air bubbles are trapped.

Bring water to a boil in a tall sauce pan. Blanch the bok choy (these leaves cook very quickly). Remove. Add the wontons and cook for about 5-7 minutes in boiling water. During the last 2 minutes, use a noodle strainer to blanch the wonton noodles. Note that the blanching time varies, depending on what type you get so make sure you check. Remove the noodles when they are al dente. Strain all the water away. Remove the cooked wontons.

Meanwhile, warm the chicken broth. In a bowl, add 1/3 cup of the broth and the last 6 ingredients. Mix well. Add the strained noodles and toss. Season the remaining broth, divide into 2 small bowls, top with chopped spring onion.

Place the noodles on a plate, arrange the wontons and bok choy around it. Serve with the bowl of broth on the side. 

And in the words of Alton Brown, "I bid you good eats!"