Yum: Chocolate Veloute

My very first endeavor for this dinner was the VERY best part of it (in my humble opinion): the chocolate veloute.

For those not into fancy french words for dessert, a veloute is basically a chocolate lava cake.  Every time i've flipped through The French Laundry Cookbook, i've stopped and drooled over this cake.  Not only does it sound absolutely delicious, it looked like a giant bowl of heaven.

And even better: it was fairly easy (and not that time consuming, if you count actual working time) to make the cake.

One thing is that you need to be pretty well prepared, since you have to melt the chocolate and make a meringue-like egg white mixture at the same time.  And this totally looks like the kitchen of someone who is well prepared, right?

[seriously, it bugged the crap out of me that my kitchen was this filthy, so I was trying to do dishes simultaneously.  My dishwasher AND garbage disposal were broken the week before, so it took a good amount of time to get through a weeks worth of dishes that piled up while we were trying to get both of these things fixed]

Back to cake: first you combine egg whites and sugar over hot water.

Then, while melting the chocolate, sugar, cocoa, and some other stuff (baking soda?  flour?  something white), I tossed the egg whites in the mixer and turned it up.  Just as the chocolate was melted, I had meringue!

I stirred a gelatin sheet into the melted chocolate (which I think was a little more dry than it was supposed to be.. luckily the gelatin water helped loosen it up a little).

I stirred in some meringue to temper, then folded in the rest.

And then I tasted it.  I don't recommend tasting it before getting it into the ring molds.... because I COULD.  NOT.  STOP.  eating it.  Absolutely no willpower.

I slipped it into the tiny spot in my freezer that I had so painstakingly cleared out... then realized the ring molds were too tall to fit.  Ten minutes and a complete freezer reorganization later, these were on the way to being frozen lava cakes.  Naturally I rewarded myself for all this hard work by licking the bowl.  Then I went and collapsed into bed in a sugar coma, ignoring the rest of my work.  But its ok, because I had lava cakes, and who would complain if I just served these for dinner???