The Bake Off Bake Along || Pudding Week – Chocolate Fondants
Another week, another bake off, and this week is chocolate fondants!
I’ve been remarkably cool and calm about my bake offs so far this year, perhaps marvelling at the fact I don’t have as much time as I perhaps did in previous years. I promise I’ll do some extravagant bakes before the end of the series, but I’ve enjoyed this leisurely stroll through each week so far.
So chocolate fondants…
I was actually going to make two different bakes this week, and I probably still will, as I’ve always wanted to try making these, but my family and Adam are all huge fans of a steamed pudding as well, so I think our weekly Tuesday pudding (for eating whilst watching the bake off, of course!) will be a steamed treacle pud, I may even also post it as a recipe as well, if I have, you’ll see it here…
With two lovely ladies visiting us this weekend, and a chilli nachos twist for dinner (swap in potato wedges for the nachos – delish!), I figured a quick easy technical would be tasty and fun.
In reality, it actually really was.
Drawing on my caramel week last week, I whizzed up a batch of salted caramel, then set about making this chocolate fondant recipe (sans peanut butter, as I wasn’t 100% sure on everyone’s preference) and from start to finish, it probably took less than half an hour!
I *should* have refrigerated the mixture as suggested for half an hour. In great wisdom I kinda figured it was a nicety rather than a must do, and actually, they did still come out gooey, but I think perhaps if I had bothered cooling it before hand, there would have been an actual lava of chocolate, rather than a splodge. Then again, I also didn’t really trust my initial judgement when I first took them out, telling myself to follow the recipe’s timings rather than trusting my instinct, and putting them back in for a couple of minutes. Perhaps this was more my error!
Still, despite being gluten free (as sometimes GF flour can be temperamental), these were spot on. Chocolate fondants that were gooey but properly baked, warm on the plate and drizzled with salted caramel and double cream, they tasted absolutely fantastic! It’s bakes like these where I should have taken more time to photograph it, but in reality we were more eager just to eat them warm!
One word from the wise is that although I also used a muffin tray and therefore halved the mixture to suit 4 of us (the recipe is for 9 portions), I still ended up with 8 individual good sized chocolate fondants, so if you only need a couple, it might be worth making 1/4 of the recipe listed!
