Chocolate Souffle Dessert – After a German Recipe

Chocolate souffle or soufflé (French: [su.fle]) is a light baked cake made with egg yolks and beaten egg whites combined with various other ingredients and served as a savory main dish or sweetened as a dessert.
The word soufflé is the past participle of the French verb “souffler” which means “to blow up” or more loosely “puff up”—an apt description of what happens to this combination of custard and egg whites.
For this recipe you need dark chocolate coating (or “Couverture” in French). This is not a brand or type of chocolate but rather a term used to describe professional-quality coating chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa butter — at least 32 percent and often as high as 39 percent for good-quality couverture. The extra cocoa butter allows the chocolate to form a thinner coating shell than non-couverture chocolate. Ghirardelli, Callebaut, Lindt, Droste or Valrhona are offering this coating. Happy Cooking!

Ingredients Chocolate Souffle

(serves 4)
25 g soft butter
25 g flour
5 cardamom pods or ground cardamom
(If you cannot get cardamom use cinnamon or vanilla  instead)
125 ml milk
30 g dark chocolate coating or couverture
20 g cocoa powder
2 egg yolks
3 egg white
35 g sugar
50 g powdered sugar

Cooking Instructions Chocolate Souffle

– Grease 4 souffle forms or cups (glass) and add some sugar which will stick on the butter; remove sugar which is not sticking.
– Knead butter and flour.
– If you use the pods remove cardamom from pods and crush it in a mortar.
– Chop the dark chocolate coarsely; in a pan heat milk, add the chocolate; add cardamom and cocoa powder as well, while stirring bring it to a boil – add the kneaded flour-butter  but not at once, bit by bit. Let it cool off.
– With a mixer add the egg yolks one after the other  until you have a smooth cream.
– Beat egg white until firm, trickle the sugar into the egg white. Fold firm egg white into the cream.
– Fill the cups or forms until 1 cm underneath the edge. Place them on a dripping pan and add as much hot water so the forms are 2/3 in the water (using the double-boiler method here).
– Bake them for 40 minutes on 400 degrees F (200 C) on the 2. level.
– Take the souffles out and sprinkle them right away with powdered sugar.

Serve them with whipped cream that can be  spiced with cardamom.