Chocolate Bouchons

Playing in the kitchen today.

I was craving chocolate and thought it would be fun to make Chocolate Bouchons. The recipe doesn’t look hard and I’ve been planning on trying it for a while, but as I scoured my pantry for ingredients, I spied some almond flour left over from macaron making as well as coffee liqueur from last summer’s obsession with mocha ice cream. Now, I usually don’t play with recipes until I’ve made them as written, but I couldn’t help myself. I broke the rules and what I came up with turned out so delicious, I might never make the Chocolate Bouchon recipe from the Bouchon Bakery cookbook I’ve been holding onto for the past few years.

Since I was winging it, I decided to make a small amount of batter, just enough to fill my silicon canele mold. This recipe yields just 8 lovely little bouchons and comes together really quickly. It’s kind of perfect for short notice chocolate cravings, and even more perfect still because my husband is not a chocolate fan. Anything I bake that is chocolate either needs to be consumed by myself or given away. Do you know how depressing it is to make an entire tray of brownies, eat a few, then know that if you don’t wrap them and give them away ASAP you’ll be consuming the whole tray yourself? Trust me when I say that learning how to bake in small quantities is a very big blessing on my sanity and waistline.

Ingredients
1/3 cup cocoa powder (I love Valhrona)
1/4 cup flour (I used 2 tblsp almond flour and 2 tbsp AP flour but I bet either would work by itself)
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1 egg
1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp coffee liqueur (you can use vanilla extract if you’d like)
1 tblsp buttermilk (optional)
1 stick of butter, melted
chocolate chips (optional)
powdered sugar for garnish

Preheat your oven to 350 F.

Prepare your molds. I brushed my silicon canele molds with a little butter. If you are using metal timbale molds, you’ll probably want to butter and flour your molds.

Next, place your flour and cocoa powder in a bowl with the salt. Whisk to combine and remove any lumps.

In a separate bowl, combine the egg and the sugar, beat with a whisk until the two are together, the egg is pale and the sugar is almost dissolved. Add your buttermilk and coffee liqueur and make sure it is one unified mixture.

Change to a spatula and fold the flour/cocoa mixture into the eggs/sugar. Once it is combined, add your melted butter and make sure it’s all one smooth batter. It’s thicker than cake batter, but not super dense.

Transfer to a piping bag and pipe into your molds (or carefully spoon the batter into your molds.) You want each mold about 2/3 full. I placed 3 semisweet chocolate chips into each mold along with the batter.

Bake at 350 F for 20 minutes then remove from oven, let sit for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a cooling rack to let them cool completely.

Once cool, sprinkle with powdered sugar and eat! They sit somewhere between cake and brownie, with intense, but not too sweet chocolate flavor.

Enjoy!