We had dinner guests last night and I attempted to cook them chocolate fondant. I was inspired by seeing this delicious looking dessert on Masterchef, a reality tv cooking show (you'd have to be living in Outer Mongolia not to know it). The dish is supposed to be a kind of chocolate crust or shell with liquid chocolate sauce in the middle. One of the judges on Masterchef describes said sauce as 'molten magma'....mmm.
The first time I saw this dish attempted on Masterchef it failed and became 'chocolate pudding' as the whole thing set like a cake. The second time around the Masterchef team seemed to pull it off easily and produced the dish en masse for a wedding. "It can't be that hard then..." I thought and armed with an internet recipe I got to work.
After an absolutely delicious vegetable and lentil cottage pie made by Mr Jac I put the chocolate fondant in the oven. This is where I like to think it all went wrong, thanks to our dodgy oven. A dessert that was meant to cook for 12 minutes had to be extended another six minutes, then another eight minutes, then another nine minutes. The bloody tops of the fondants wouldn't set!
Finally they were done on top and I dished them up happily as I thought I could see a 'damp patch' on their bottoms that surely indicated the presence of magma. We all dug eagerly in to our fondants to discover a SOLID and rather tough cakey texture throughout the whole pudding. Masterchef #fail. Everyone politely chewed through it, although only one out of four of us actually ate the whole thing.
It was a very disappointing result. I'm putting it down to a combination of our unreliable oven, that last nine minutes (a wee bit too long), and perhaps that fact that where the recipe stated to 'whisk', I 'beat' instead. I shall persevere however, and inform the blogosphere when I do succeed with chocolate fondant. I want my magma.
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