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Chocolate Soufflee Cakes

Time45 minutes
YieldsMakes 4 cakes
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Every year chocolate is celebrated on Valentine’s Day for its sensual romantic symbolism, its power as an aphrodisiac to awaken slumbering passions. Its bittersweet complexity is as sharp and rewarding as love itself. But if an edible substitute for love is what you’re after, there are other foods that fill the void more easily and with less attendant baggage than chocolate.

Still, it’s easy to see where chocolate gets its reputation. Caffeine and sugar make it a stimulant rivaled by few other foods. It melts yieldingly at body temperature. Historically it’s been used to treat everything from poor appetite to mental fatigue, and heroes of children’s literature have self-medicated with the stuff to great effect. Harry Potter eats chocolate to ward off the chill caused by soul-sucking Dementors. Charlie Bucket drinks a nourishing draught from a warm chocolate river in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Now it looks as if every fantasy of chocolate as a health food might be true. Marcel Desaulniers, known for gratuitously sexy, truly dark chocolate desserts with names like “Chocolate Bypass Cake,” refers in his latest book, “Death by Chocolate Cakes” (William Morrow, $35), to the heartening results of a Harvard study in which candy eaters lived an average of a year longer than non-candy eaters.

Even more promising was the news a few months ago that chocolate contains some of the same antioxidants responsible for giving red wine and green tea their heart-healthy reputation.

Maybe in the not-too-distant future we’ll be reading about the “Chocolate Paradox,” as scientists scramble to account for the fact that people who regularly consume chocolate (along with lots of butter, sugar, cream and eggs-hey, we can dream!) lead longer, happier lives.

Which means that now is the time to share a chocolate dessert with your valentine, before it loses its cachet and becomes as romantic as a bowl of oat bran.

There’s no better meeting place for forks and spoons than the cream-filled center of a chocolate baba-a tender, subtly chocolate brioche soaked with rum syrup-or some other decadent confection.

On second thought, as good as these are, you’d better plan on making two-sharing might be hazardous to your health.

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1

Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

2

Butter 4 (6-ounce) ramekins and dust them with granulated sugar, tapping out the excess.

3

Melt the butter and chocolate together in the top of a double boiler set over, but not touching, simmering water. Remove the chocolate from the heat when melted, but keep it warm.

4

Whip the egg yolks with 2 tablespoons of sugar at high speed until thick and pale yellow, 5 to 7 minutes. Fold the yolk mixture into the melted chocolate.

5

Butter 4 (6-ounce) ramekins and dust them with granulated sugar, tapping out the excess.

6

In a clean bowl with a clean whisk, whip the egg whites until frothy. Gradually add the remaining 2 tablespoons of sugar and whip until very soft peaks form. Stir about a third of the whites into the chocolate batter to lighten it. Then pour the remaining beaten egg whites over the top. Gently fold the egg whites and chocolate mixture together. Sift the cake flour over the batter and gently fold it in.

7

Pour the batter into the ramekins and bake the cakes until the tops are puffed and set and a cake tester inserted into the center comes out with moist crumbs attached, 20 to 22 minutes. Sprinkle each with powdered sugar and serve warm or at room temperature. The cakes will fall slightly as they start to cool.

A chocolate souffle cake should be intensely chocolatey but not at all dense, offering only the slightest springy resistance to dueling forks. A little cake flour gives this one just enough body to keep it from collapsing as it cools.