Baby Chocolate Oblivions

This picture says it all. How do you feel about unvarnished chocolate? If the idea of something that is the essence of pure, rich chocolate, enriched by butter and saved from heaviness by the addition of beaten eggs, this cake will be your idea of heaven. If that description sounds over the top, then this is probably not the cake for you.
Compared to last week's various buttercream fiascos, these baby cakes are simplicity itself: Melt together a bit of sugar and a lot of high-quality butter and chocolate,

heat a half-dozen beaten eggs until they're lukewarm,

and then beat them again until they've tripled in size and gone from egg-yolk yellow to eggnog cream.

Then fold the eggs into the chocolate.

Actually getting them baked was much tricker than mixing them up. I had two six-cup silicone muffin pans instead of one twelve-cup pan, and an ancient roasting pan that was just a hair too small to hold both pans without smooshing them up a bit. Fortunately, because they're silicone, they smooshed easily.

But the really tricky part was getting the pans and the rack out of the roasting pan, which had hot water on the bottom, without a) burning your hands, b) getting hot water on the cakes, c) accidentally squirting more water on the cakes when trying to pull water out of the pan with a bulb baster, or d) all of the above. Note to self: throw that miserable cheap bulb baster away and get one that works. Also, Rose says that the cakes just twist easily out of the pans. I didn't think it was that easy, and many of the cakes left little pieces behind. This was not all bad, of course, because I was forced to eat all these little leftover pieces. And eventually, I got them all out of the pans, and even the ones that had absorbed a bit of hot water seemed none the worse for wear.

I invited a few neighbors over to test these cakes. Fortunately, they were all chocolate lovers. These baby Oblivions is that they come within just a hair of being too much--too rich, too chocolatey, too fudgy. But even the small piece of cake is probably too much. With the first bite, you may think this is the most delicious thing you've ever eaten. By the tenth bite, you're not sure you can, or should, eat another forkful. When I took the rest of the cakes into work, I noticed that everyone dived into theirs with great enthusiasm, but not everyone ate the whole piece. Even with these provisos, my final verdict is that this cake is chocolate with a soul.