Le Biscuit de Chocolat Coulant

Molten chocolate cake, utterly ubiquitous in many a restaurant menu. And for good reason - few things are bigger crowd-pleasers and make for better pupil-dilating menu hyperbole. If you've been seduced by sexy menuspeak into eating more than your fair share of the at best moist and certainly not molten, you now probably avoid ordering it. The molten chocolate cake being essentially underbaked cake batter, you know all it takes is a split-second of inattention in the kitchen for the stuff to go from oozing to overdone.

Yet, when actually molten, I know of no other dessert as capable of making most adults as gleeful as children...there's something about that self-saucing pudding-ness that's immensely satisfying. Much as with risotto, molten chocolate cake is one recipe with which the home cook has the advantage over the harried restaurant kitchen minion. Chances are, one's not struggling to cope with a flurry of order tickets and one's attention is less likely to wander, thus ensuring an ideal mi-cuit state of runniness.

However, if you happen like me to have the attention span of a gnat, a part-baked moelleux au chocolat may not prove goof-proof. You may have to take the results-guaranteed approach. Such as that for Michel Bras' biscuit de chocolat coulant, which seekers of 3 Michelin-starred thrills will intone is the oft imitated, never bettered original, first created in 1981 and interpreted in endlessly brilliant variants since then at the legendary inn in Laguiole, Southwest France. Sure, the approach is a tad more finicky, requiring the stirring of two separate components rather than one and an extra bowl to wash up- a ganache, which you freeze into squat little cylinders, to be enveloped within a cake batter, which you pipe into the individual metal ring molds (of greater depth and diameter than the ganache cylinders) to completely surround the ganache.

Once baked (from frozen), the ganache liquefies into bittersweet nectar, dammed by a shell of soft cake with a delicately crisp crust. Once pierced with spoon, the cake languidly discharges its molten heart of darkness - interactive installation art on a plate, surely.

The recipe can be found in The Notebooks of Michel Bras: Desserts. With line-drawings and a pithy style (this ostensibly being conceived of as a "notebook") in lieu of photographs and lengthy instructions (which you'd probably expect for recipes of a fairly complex nature) it's neither desserts-for-dummies, nor does it claim to be. Nonetheless, of the recipes I've attempted, measurements are precise to the last gram and temperatures accurate, although I've on occasion had to adjust baking times - not because of erroneous instructions, but because many of the recipes specify the use of molds (with given dimensions) and the dimensions of mine differ slightly. But more importantly, the book gives a very insipiring insight into the thought processes and emotions behind Michel Bras' divine compositions, masterly orchestrations of flavours, textures and temperatures in quest of sensorial delight, replete with charming, often whimsical, presentation - sweet fuel for the reader's own flights of fancy, promising to evoke a childlike wonderment both in the means and the end.

Back to the cake. Topped with a scoop of ice-cream, you couldn't be happier. And as the snow white melts and spills unto warm ebony depths, all ooze and puddle, you can't help but fleetingly glimpse its muse - the wintry horizons of the austere Aubrac plateau. And if you ask me, lazy uncoordinated urban dweller that I am, le biscuit de chocolat coulant presents all the après-ski chalet cosiness sans the hassle of a cross-country ski trip, and much, much more fun.