Chocolate soufflé

As a baker, I've never been brave enough to tackle making a soufflé. These finicky savoury or sweet dishes are renown for puffing up and overflowing during cooking before spectacularly caving in on themselves. It turns out my fears were unfounded - well, at least for the recipe I eventually tried. Success on the first attempt is almost unheard of for me but this one was almost brag-worthy.

I found this recipe for chocolate soufflé for two on the Crunchy Creamy Sweet dessert baking blog. I like how they are made in mini cocotte dishes but found that the recipe has a missing step, so I've revised it here and converted it into metric. I made the soufflés using Whittaker's 72% Dark Ghana chocolate and Heilala vanilla extract, which resulted in a full, rich flavour. It's an oven dessert so a good one to have pre-prepared, then put in to cook while you're serving dinner - a yummy 'sometimes treat' for winter nights.

Chocolate soufflé

Ingredients

• 1 T cocoa
• 90 g dark chocolate, chopped
• 30 g butter, melted
• 2 eggs, separated
• 1/2 t vanilla extract
• dash (1/8 t) of salt
• dash (1/8 t) of cream of tartar
• 2 T caster sugar

Method

1. Preheat oven to 190°C. Grease two mini cocotte dishes or 250 ml ramekins with additional butter. Sprinkle bottom and sides with cocoa powder, tapping off excess. Set aside.
2. Melt chocolate and butter together. Whisk until smooth. Set aside to cool to room temperature.
3. Add egg yolks to cooled chocolate mixture one at a time and whisk to combine. Add vanilla extract and whisk until smooth.
4. In a clean bowl of a stand mixer, with a clean whisk, beat egg whites with salt, cream of tartar and caster sugar on medium speed until frothy. Increase the speed to high and beat until stiff peaks form. Do not over beat. Keep checking the peaks. As soon as you see the stiff peaks form, stop.
5. Add 1/3 of meringue into the chocolate mixture. Gently fold until just combined. Repeat twice until the mixture is fully combined and no streaks remain. Do not over fold.
6. Spoon the mixture into prepared cocotte dishes. At this stage, you can cover the dishes and refrigerate until ready to bake.
7. Place cocottes on a baking tray and bake for 20 minutes.
8. Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve immediately.

Chocolate soufflé