Lady Grey Chocolate Pudding Cake

A slightly bonkers recipe, am afraid dyslexia got the better of me on this one. Originally this was a recipe for an Earl Grey chocolate cake I found in a French chocolate recipe book. It sounded like the perfect rich cake with tons of dark chocolate and lots of fragrant bergamot from the Earl Grey to add a bit of pizazz. Lady Grey, the orange version of Earl Grey tea, is a particular favourite of mine so I decided to swap the latter for the former. Off I went, measuring the ingredients, happily steeping the tea in hot milk as instructed and then when it came to mixing everything together I had...chocolate soup. 

Now, I may be mistaken, but great chocolate cake generally does not start life as a soup. It should really be like a thick batter rather than liquid. However, having assembled said soup I thought I'd better go ahead and bake it. Hence the title - chocolate pudding cake. You see, I'd misread the measurements of milk as being 5 dl (500ml) instead of 5 cl (50ml), so there was 10 times as much liquid in the recipe as the recipe required!

The net result? A lot of chocolate pudding, with a rather delicious Lady Grey flavour! Plus ca change, baking wouldn't be fun if one didn't make mistakes now and again! 

Original recipe (probably delicious, just don't increase quantity of milk by 10x!)

180g butter

3 eggs

120g dark chocolate

1 tea bag - earl or lady you choose

150g sugar

180g flour

3 pinches salt

50ml milk

Preheat oven to 200 Celsius. Lighlty grease a tin.

In a saucepan, scald the milk and add the tea bag to infuse for 2 mins, or use loose tea if you have it.

Melt the chocolate in a bain marie. Cream the butter, add the yolks, the melted chocolate, then the flour and salt. Finally add the milk and stir through until it forms an even consistency

Separate the egg white from the yolk and using an electric whisk, beat the whites in a medium bowl til stiff peak. Add the sugar and bring the mixture to stiff peak again. Add a spoonful of this to the first mixture to loosen it, then fold in the rest.

Bake for 45 mins to 1 hour, turning the heat down to 180 after 15 minutes. Enjoy with a cup of tea...