Salted Caramel Chocolate Fondant

A proper one, with a frozen core of salted caramel buried in the centre, so it melts to a liquid pool the moment you break in. Make the caramel ahead, and the rest is twelve minutes’ work.

There is a particular sound a good fondant makes when you put a spoon to it, a kind of small, satisfied collapse, and then the slow dark spread across the plate. I have made a great many of these over the years, for dinners that mattered and for evenings that didn’t need to be special but became so anyway, and the salted caramel version is the one I come back to most. Chocolate and caramel were clearly designed for each other, and the salt does the thing salt always does in a pudding, it doesn’t make it less sweet, exactly, it makes the sweetness make sense.

The fondant has something of a reputation for being temperamental, a restaurant dessert that home cooks approach with caution, and I understand why. The classic method asks you to underbake a chocolate cake by a precise and slightly nerve-wracking number of minutes, and hope. My version sidesteps the anxiety almost entirely, because the molten centre isn’t really the cake’s doing at all. It’s a small disc of salted caramel, frozen solid and buried in the batter, which simply melts in the oven while the fondant around it sets. The cake gets to behave like a cake. The drama is all caramel.

This does mean a little planning, because the caramel needs to be properly frozen, not just chilled, before it goes anywhere near the oven. I treat this as a feature rather than a flaw. I make a batch of the caramel discs whenever I have a free twenty minutes, and keep them in the freezer in a little bag, so that a chocolate fondant is, more often than I’d like to admit, about fifteen minutes away from being possible on any given Tuesday. You can also assemble the whole fondants ahead, unbaked, and keep them in the fridge for a few hours or the freezer for weeks. Few desserts let you do quite this much of the work in advance and still arrive at the table looking like you didn’t.

A note on timing, because it’s the one thing that actually matters here: take them out while the centre still feels soft when you press the top gently. It will look slightly underdone. It is not. The residual heat finishes the job in the minute it takes to turn them out, and a fondant left in “to be safe” is a fondant with no pool on the plate, which rather defeats the purpose.

Makes 4. About 20 minutes’ active work, plus freezing time for the caramel cores.

Ingredients

For the salted caramel cores

– 50g caster sugar

– 25ml double cream

– 1 tsp sea salt flakes, plus more to finish

For the fondant

– 100g unsalted butter, plus extra for the moulds

– 100g dark chocolate (70%), chopped

– 2 large eggs

– 2 large egg yolks

– 75g caster sugar

– 50g plain flour, plus extra for the moulds

– 1 tbsp cocoa powder, for dusting the moulds

1. Make the salted caramel cores

Scatter the sugar evenly over a small heavy-based saucepan and melt over medium heat without stirring, swirling the pan occasionally, until it turns a deep amber. Take it off the heat and carefully whisk in the cream, it will splutter, followed by the salt. Pour onto a piece of baking paper or into a small silicone mould and freeze until completely solid, then break or cut into 4 small pieces, roughly a teaspoon each.

2. Prepare the moulds

Generously butter four 150ml pudding moulds or ramekins, then dust with flour and tip out the excess, followed by a dusting of cocoa powder. This is what lets the fondants slip out cleanly later, so be thorough, especially around the base.

3. Melt the butter and chocolate

Heat the oven to 200°C (180°C fan). Melt the butter and chocolate together in a heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water, or in short bursts in the microwave, stirring until smooth. Set aside to cool slightly.

4. Whisk the eggs and sugar

In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs, egg yolks and sugar together until pale, thick and roughly doubled in volume, about 2 to 3 minutes with an electric whisk. This whipping is what gives the fondant its lift.

5. Combine

Fold the melted chocolate mixture into the whisked eggs, then sift in the flour and fold gently until just combined. Don’t overmix, a few streaks are fine.

6. Bury the caramel

Divide half the batter between the moulds. Press a frozen caramel core into the centre of each, then cover with the remaining batter so the caramel is fully buried and not touching the sides.

7. Bake

Bake for 11 to 13 minutes. The top should be risen and set like a cake, but the centre should still feel soft when you press it gently. Don’t be tempted to give it longer for safety’s sake; a slightly underbaked fondant is the entire point.

Turn out and serve at once.

Leave the fondants in their moulds for exactly 1 minute, no longer, then run a knife around the edge and turn each one out onto a plate. Scatter with a few extra flakes of sea salt and serve immediately, while the centre is still molten.

A fondant this rich needs something cold and something plain, and very little else. Vanilla ice cream is the obvious choice, and the obvious choice is correct: the contrast of hot and cold, the way the ice cream begins to melt into the caramel as it spreads, is most of the pleasure. If you’d rather something lighter, a spoonful of crème fraîche or barely sweetened whipped cream does the same cooling job without competing for attention.

Fruit is where I’d be careful. Anything too sharp fights the caramel rather than complementing it, but a few segments of blood orange in winter, or a small handful of raspberries lightly crushed with a little sugar in summer, add a note of acidity that the dish, for all its richness, is quietly glad of. Nothing more elaborate than that. This is a pudding that has already done the work; the sides are there to listen.

“This is one of my own recipes, cooked and loved many times at home. Not a paid or gifted feature” – Lara S. Editor-in-chief