Well, I’ve gotten a little off-track with my baking the past month so apologies there. However, stay tuned as I’ll be posting the 12 Days of Christmas Baking starting on Christmas Day. The goal is to try something new everyday and I’m already pulling together recipes so prepare yourselves! 🙂

We just recently purchased a cast iron skillet and my husband has spent the last month seasoning it. Tonight we tried a Hot Fudge Pudding Cake, compliments America’s Test Kitchen (ATK). As a note, they don’t post their recipes online so the link below is only available to members. If you’re interested in trying this check out their cast-iron cookbook on their website below or available on Amazon from Cook’s Country, which is the same people. If you’ve never used ATK recipes before you should know that they always work but you have to follow the instructions exactly. One of the things we love about ATK is they try things multiple times until they find the perfect recipe so they take all of the guesswork out of baking (unless of course you do something wrong during the process). You should definitely check them out as it’s well worth the cost of their cookbooks but that’s just my opinion. Enough chatter though…. onto the recipe!

This was a fairly easy recipe to put together and foolproof if you have all of your ingredients pre-measured. Do not try to use this recipe in anything other than a cast iron skillet as this recipe is created specifically for that, plus it’s formulated for a 10-inch skillet. Be warned that when you put all of the ingredients in the pan before putting into the oven to bake it will look like it isn’t mixed properly; but we put it in the oven and just trusted things would turn out right.

While the name of this recipe does involve the word cake, that isn’t what you’re looking for here. This is meant to be more of a lava-like so you do not want to bake this any longer than recommended. The edges will pull away from the sides and the middle will bubble like a tar-pit. You want to eat this while it’s still warm, but we let it sit for about 15 minutes before dipping into it.

This tasted really good, however it was really rich. It calls for a cup of coffee and a half cup of water, but if we made this again we would probably swap those as it was a little too heavy on the coffee. You could also substitute some of the water for a liquor or brandy if desired. Also, it was a little too sweet for our taste as it calls for a cup of granulated sugar and a 1/3 cup of brown sugar; plus 2 ounces of bittersweet chocolate. Next time we might cut out a third of cup of the granulated sugar to see if that helps. We also just used Nestle chocolate chips so using a higher quality eating chocolate like Ghirardelli (might add a slight floral note) would probably be better.

Overall though it was really good, even without ice cream and pretty easy! I would definitely recommend making this for a small crowd as it’s very rich and best when warm.

Baking Ease	9
Time Spent	9
Taste	8
Visual	8

Recipe Used: America’s Test Kitchen