Hot chocolate fudge sauce
Fudge sauce comes in many forms – some made with cocoa powder and evaporated milk, some with melted chocolate, some a combination of the two. The hot fudge sauce for this cake is the most luxurious of its kind – pourable chocolate ganache that’s made with just chocolate and cream.
Chocolate fudge sauce ingredients
The ratio of chocolate to cream is 1:1 for ganache. However, as I want the sauce to be slightly thicker when warm, I’ve increased the chocolate slightly so it’s 1/ 1/4 cups of chocolate (200g) to 1 cup / 250ml of cream.
Dark chocolate – I use standard baking dark chocolate melts or chips (US: semi-sweet chocolate chips). You can also use chopped 50 – 70% dark chocolate (Lindt is my favourite).
Chocolate melts are just a type of chocolate chips that is available here in Australia. It comes in a disc shape and is designed to melt easily and smoothly. Whereas chocolate chips, while they can also be used for melting, are designed specifically to hold their shape for your favourite chocolate chip cookies rather than melting into puddles.
Milk and white chocolate – These will work but you will need to reduce the amount of cream slightly else the fudge sauce will be too runny. This is because they are softer than dark chocolate. Fellow baking nerds can read more about this in my Chocolate Ganache recipe!
Cream – Either heavy / thickened cream or pure cream will work here. Full fat essential. Reduced fat doesn’t always mix properly into the chocolate and also the sauce will be too thin.
How to make Hot Chocolate Fudge Cake
Get the cake in the oven first. Then make the chocolate fudge sauce – it will need 20 to 30 minutes to cool a bit to allow it to thicken slightly before using.
1. Making the hot fudge cake
Just mixed up in one bowl with a whisk. No stand-mixer or electric beater required. This is a very forgiving cake. Just be sure to get it in the oven as soon as you mix the batter, don’t leave it lying around.
How to make Hot chocolate fudge cake
Mix Dry – Whisk the Dry ingredients in a large bowl.
Add Wet – Add the Wet ingredients, except the boiling water, into the same bowl.
Whisk until combined. Then whisk the boiling water in. The batter will be pretty thin – not as thin as the Chocolate Cake on which this recipe is based, but still pretty thin.
Pour the batter into a lined 20cm/8″ pan. It’s best not to use a springform pan to avoid any chance of batter leakage – because as noted above, the batter is fairly thin.
