This weekend has been a chocolate-filled one as I made not one, but two chocolate-based bakes! It’s also a bit tricky for me to do this because while my dad and I love sweet stuff, my mum is the sort that says dark chocolate is too sweet so making something that pleases everyone is difficult.

Self-Saucing Chocolate Pudding

The first recipe comes from this book, which I recently remembered I owned:

I probably received this about a decade ago, which was when I started wanting to learn to cook. Wanting to learn to cook, however, means nothing if you don’t actually bother learning and this book just languished on my shelves because I learnt to cook in Japan and thus had a whole different set of recipes to follow. But the recipe for self-saucing chocolate pudding looked pretty straightforward so I decided to try it!

Sorry for the poor picture but I decided to make this on a Friday night and by the time I was done, there was no good lighting to be had. And the pudding was really only self-saucing on Friday night – we had this small one for supper that day and when I heated the rectangle pan on Saturday, I found this:

It’s a very moist cake inside, but there’s no sauce. The sauce from Friday night became a fudgy center by Saturday, which actually isn’t a bad thing. I really liked how this turned out in the end.

Chocolate Fudge Crinkle Cookies

I spent most of my week wanting to make this – the BBC Good Food recipe page was left open on my browser for DAYS because I was afraid of losing the page. But, it did not really go as planned.

For one thing, the dough was very, very soft. I think that was right, given the recipe, but it makes it very hard to shape into cookie-shapes. And another thing, I couldn’t get my final product to look like the one in the recipe. Here are two photos from before and after baking:

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I’d roll the cookie dough in the icing sugar until it’s white, but even before it goes in the over, you can see that the icing sugar starts to dissolve. By the time it came out of the oven, a lot of it was melted (especially for the cookies that were shaped first).

The good thing about this recipe, however, is that I had to bake in batches and that really helped me learn more about iterating on a recipe. I started baking at 190C for 10 minutes but the cookies turned out fairly dry. I switched to 170C for 10 minutes, which made the cookies softer but not fudgy. By the fourth and last batch, I had changed the settings to 150C and 8 minutes, which made the cookies slightly fudgy. Not as much as I hoped, but a great improvement over the first batch.

If you’ve made this and you have a tip on how I can improve, please let me know!

Also, I misjudged what ingredients I needed to buy – I thought I was out of icing sugar, but as it turns out, I now have too much icing sugar (there was an opened bag) and no more caster sugar. If you have recipes you love that require icing sugar, let me know so I can use mine up!