Chocolate Molten (Lava) Cake

I've been pretty inspired to bake a lava cake for quite some time and for some reasons the previous attempts while I was in the states always ended up quite disastrous (i.e. inedible). This time I tried to do it again with a different recipe with great reviews on allrecipe less the raspberries.

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Recipe from Allrecipe.com

Ingredients

1 cup unsalted butter or unsalted margarine*
8 ounces semisweet chocolate chips, or bars, cut into bite-size chunks
5 large eggs
1/2 cup sugar
Pinch of salt
4 teaspoons flour (or matzo meal, ground in a blender to a fine powder)
8 extra-large paper muffin cups (or use regular paper muffin cups, which will make 12 cakes)

Garnish:
1 (6 ounce) container raspberries, barely moistened and rolled in about
1/2 cup sugar right before serving


Method

a) Melt butter and chocolate in a medium heat-proof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water; remove from heat. Beat eggs, sugar and salt with a hand mixer in a medium bowl until sugar dissolves. Beat egg mixture into chocolate until smooth. Beat in flour or matzo meal until just combined. (Batter can be made a day ahead; return to room temperature an hour or so before baking.)

b) Before serving dinner, adjust oven rack to middle position; heat oven to 450 degrees. Line a standard-size muffin tin (1/2 cup capacity) with 8 extra-large muffin papers (papers should extend above cups to facilitate removal). Spray muffin papers with vegetable cooking spray.

c) Divide batter among muffin cups.
Bake until batter puffs but center is not set, 8 to 10 minutes. Carefully lift cakes from tin and set on a work surface. Pull papers away from cakes and transfer cakes to dessert plates.

d) Top each with sugared raspberries and serve immediately.

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Afraid that I might fail again I've only made two portions. I used Hershey's special dark chocolate (2 bars) with 85g of butter and melted them in a make shift double boiler.

I honestly think it melted a little too much and its more watery than I expected. Nevertheless I continued on the recipe since the most expensive ingredient (butter) was already irreversibly melted.

I also poured a little too much sugar into the batter and had to scoop it out in a furry before they dissolved into the eggs. (note to self: STOP pouring ingredients into the mix straight from the bag) And I suspected the weighing scale screwed up for a bit and I added too little flour.

Overall it just seemed kind of a disaster.

I poured the batter into 2 ramekins (instead of muffin cups) and popped it into the oven to see how it goes.

Well it came out surprisingly alright, everything it should be. Crispy top, molten centre, very fragrant (even without vanilla essence).

I read that there is two different ways to make a lava cake, one which is like this recipe - a "pudding" like cake whereby we underbake the cake resulting in a liquid center. Another is that we stuff a chocolate ganuche into the middle of the cake and bake it, with the center being the ganuche rather than the batter.

The cake-ish layer was very moist and light, but I think I will prefer something with more of a brownie texture. Next time I will try a brownie recipe with ganuche in the middle. Let's see how that will go.