Chocolate cake: a sweet delight from France.

The chocolate cake with a soft center is a delicious and tempting single-serving dessert that captures eyes and palate with every dip of the spoon. For chocolate lovers, it's a true delight. Imagine hot chocolate mixed with the fragrance of the cake, an explosion of flavor that will delight you. But what is the history of this famous dessert? Who invented it? How can you replicate the original recipe at home? Discover with us the curiosities that have made this dessert famous all over the world.

Chocolate Cake: The Story of This Dessert

He didn’t attend prestigious cooking schools, nor did he have experience as a top chef, yet Michel Bras, a French chef born in 1946, has gifted us extraordinary creations: among them, the chocolate cake with a soft center.

Thanks to his creativity, this chef, famous among professionals, won 3 Michelin stars in 1992. In 2017, he asked the inspectors of the famous guide to withdraw the stars to work with more tranquility and less pressure.

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The restaurant is now completely managed by his son Sebastien, whom dad Michel had studied under the famous chef Paul Bocuse.

However, let’s get to the story of our chocolate heart cake, the wonderful Coulant au chocolat, its original name, which has now become part of the dessert menus in numerous elite restaurants around the world and beyond.

The dessert officially originated in 1981, after two years of experiments, working with the contrasts of hot/cold and crunchy/flowing. Here are the words with which Bras describes it: «After two years of reflections, adjustments, and attempts, the recipe was created one fine day in 1981, a feeling of enthusiasm and pride rarely experienced in the life of a chef».

The coulant consists of two distinct parts: a biscuit dough and a frozen chocolate ganache that is inserted into the biscuit. Michel describes it as «a flow of melting lava at the first spoonful. A fascinating spectacle, an ecstasy of the senses».

The outer part of the coulant is a crunchy chocolate biscuit dough, a fragrant and consistent outer shell that must be fully cooked. The heart is a preparation made of cream and chocolate, without eggs and flour.

Chocolate Cake: The Original Recipe

Here is the recipe from Michel Bras for the biscuit coulant au chocolat. For the biscuit, you need 110 g of dark chocolate, 40 g of cornstarch, 40 g of almond flour, 2 eggs, 100 g of sugar, and 50 g of butter. Melt the chocolate and butter, mix until combined, let cool, and incorporate the egg yolks, sugar, almond flour, and cornstarch. Separately, whip the egg whites. Fold them into the mixture and transfer everything to a piping bag.

For the chocolate heart: 120 g of dark chocolate and 250 g of cream, at a ratio of one to two. Finely chop the chocolate, bring the cream to a boil, then pour it over the chopped chocolate; emulsify with a whisk. Pour the mixture into molds and place it in the freezer for at least 3-4 hours: it must freeze completely. Butter the molds or use a cylindrical cookie cutter, lining the inner edges with parchment paper. Pour the biscuit dough until halfway up the mold, insert the frozen heart, and cover again with the biscuit dough.

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Bake the cake in a convection oven at 180 °C for 15 minutes and serve hot.

Of course, nothing prevents you from using white chocolate if you want to recreate a white chocolate cake, rather than milk or dark chocolate. In the kitchen, always remember that the only limit is your imagination.

Chocolate Cake: With Spaghetti and Mandolino, Only Quality

Why not indulge in a delicious tour of all our chocolate delights? How can you resist temptation in front of the organic Modica chocolate from Sabadì? Or the dark chocolate from Bonnet and Domori? These are all excellent products created by professional artisans, small yet renowned companies that have made high quality a true company philosophy to pursue every day.

Remember that Spaghetti & Mandolino has always been a synonym for quality: an Italian e-commerce platform that guarantees excellent chocolate and spreads, which, as such, deserve shipping and packaging that preserve the integrity and freshness of each product through special freshness-preserving packaging!

Francesco Scuderi