Perfection in Baked Chocolate Pudding Form

I love to eat, bake, cook, read food blogs and constantly try new recipes.

You would think that I would be a cookbook book queen, right?

Well, although I have quite a few a cookbooks that I have bought or been given over the past few years, I rarely ever use them.

True confession.

I haven't even cooked from my Jamie Oliver Cookbook. Eek-I know, it's awful. I'll get there someday, hopefully.

But, I decided to leap into my Ina Garten "Back to Basics" Cookbook and pull out a decadent and delicious dessert.

I love watching Ina's show, Barefoot Contessa, and love her simplistic yet sophisticated cooking style.

Since I was looking for something to serve my girlfriends while we watched wedding movies, I headed to the chocolate dessert section of this handy cookbook.

And I found this...baked chocolate pudding. Yes, it was as good as it sounds.

Imagine the perfect marriage between a brownie, chocolate lava cake and moist chocolate cake, and you've got this rich dessert. It was pretty easy to mix up and transformed butter and cocoa powder to a deep, complex chocolate flavor. 

I've always wanted to make a chocolate lava cake, and although this isn't quite that gooey, it holds its shape and goes so moist when you heat it up.

Since I didn't have one pan big enough to fit another pan in to use hot water bath (as Ina suggested), I decided to use these adorable orange ramekins that a wonderful lady and fellow foodie gave me for a wedding gift. Thanks Aunt Jocey!

The hot water bath makes them come out so moist and perfect!

Perfection pictured here:

Perfection best served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, as always.

*Click on the recipe card to enlarge and save

Look forward to some amazing baking recipes on the blog soon, thanks to this new member of my culinary family.

AND the Great Food Truck Race and T-flo (if you don't recognize this reference to Tyler Florence, you need to start listening to the Joy the Baker podcast) came to my town and so did some pretty cool snails (the hot pink guys on top of the building)! This summer is looking up.