molten chocolate cake

During New York Restaurant Week, the Famiree went to Nougatine at Jean-Georges, which we found delightful. One of the most memorable dishes was the Warm Chocolate Cake with Vanilla Bean Ice Cream. Livy took this picture of it:

 It was really good. Maybe because Jean-Georges is the (self-proclaimed) creator, inventor and popularize-er of the chocolate molten cake. Some French guy says otherwise. (This is according to wikipedia). Tonight I was in charge of dessert so I decided to try and replicate Jean-Georges' version. The recipe is actually a lot simpler than I thought it would be; it only has a few ingredients. Even so, I had some execution problems. It was still pretty yum though - what can be wrong about super hot melted chocolate pouring out from inside a layer of chocolate cake?

The middle-liquidy part spilled out each time I tried to flip the cakes out of their dishes, so that by the last one I decided to leave the lil guy in there and just sprinkled some powdered sugar on top. I think baking the cakes for a little longer than the recipe's suggested 6-7 minutes would allow the outside, solid cake layer to be thicker and thus (hopefully) support the melted insides better when flipping it out of the baking dish. It could just be my oven, too. I will continue to experiment. This would be perfect with vanilla ice cream, which we did not have, so I served it with mint chocolate chip and lots of whipped cream.