Apr 7, 20247 min read

Chocolate lava bomb cookie

Updated: Apr 16, 2024

Ever since I have started baking, I don't think I have been able to have a dinner party without baking something for dessert to end the night off. Now I know that might not seem very healthy to some of you BUT I personally think that it's not a good day unless you treat yourself with something sweet that makes you happy at the end of it.

So if you're like me, you're gonna need to open up your notes app and find some simple recipes to park in there so that whenever you have a bad day or wanna impress someone with your AMAZING culinary skills, you have recipes to use. And this lava bomb cookie is one of those recipe you need to put in that notes app right now!!

In my mind, under the broad context of desserts, there are many subcategories, of which one of them is "After dinner desserts with ice cream". Now you might be a bit confused on why there's the specific component of ice cream in that category of desserts so let me clarify. Whenever my guests come over, I think they feel the need to bring over something, and that something is usually vanilla ice cream. IDK if anyone else has the same situation as me but im not complaining. This just means that whenever my guests come over, I have to bake something that can be warm, buttery and has to pair perfectly with ice cream. Some ideas of these "After dinner desserts with ice cream" include, apple crumble, sticky date pudding, molten lava cakes, and lastly, chocolate bomb cookies. Can you see the similarities between these desserts? they are super sweet, chewy, decadent treats that NEED a refreshing, palette cleanser, which is where ice cream comes into place!

Name : Chocolate lava bomb cookie

Description: Buttery, crispy outer cookie shell with a oozey, molten chocolate filling and soft cookie dough centre. served with a scoop of refreshingly cold vanilla ice cream

Flavour Rating: 9/10 (there is NOTHING better than cookies fresh out of the oven, and by fresh I mean these were devoured within 5 minutes of coming out of the oven)

Difficulty rating: 7/10 (if you don't mind your cookies turning out like mine, which I will elaborate more on later in the blog, then its not that hard, but if you wanna actually achieve that picture worthy chocolate BOMB, its much more complicated)

Occasion: After dinner dessert with ice cream for my mom's church friends!

Cookie bomb exploding in the oven

I think you can assume that the whole point of a cookie bomb is for the chocolate to explode when you press the scoop of ice-cream on it, right before you eat it. Well i'm not too sure if theres like something wrong with my mini chocolate bomb but I think It was a bit too excited, because it started to EXPLODE the moment it got in the oven )):

In the midst of this panic though, I managed to get a somewhat aesthetic picture of the middle cookie which was still holding up in the midst of the chaos and pools of chocolate explosion beneath it

Anyways, of course as I squatted in front of the oven for 10 minutes while anxiously monitoring the "death rate" of my cookies I was thinking and wondering, why on earth this was happening. I mean I followed all the instructions that was in the recipe and my cookies looked super promising before I chucked them into the oven. While I do not have a very definitive answer to this I have a few guesses. 1. Cookie dough was too soft

I think this might have been due to a bit of a planning issue I had...HAHA cus I started making these cookies only when my guests arrived and wanted to start eating dinner, so I was in a tad rush to finish these up. The recipe did only call for like a 30-50 minute chilling time in the fridge but I didnt use a timer which is honestly a bad idea when you're in a rush cus you will probably feel that time is passing by much faster than it is. Plus it's a general rule of thumb that you always give your cookie dough more time to rest so that it develops its flavour. ESPECIALLY cus these are lava cookies and they need more time to build that firm shell so that it can contain the chocolate inside.
Basically, the premature explosions could be due to the fact that the cookie dough was basically just too soft and could not contain the chocoalte well enough

2. Filled them with too much chocolate

I was very focused on nailing the chocolate bomb part that I felt, the more I filled the cookies with chocolate, the bigger the explosion would be when I dug into the cookie later. My brain did happen to skip through the possibility that the more chocolate I filled the cookies with, the higher the chances that they would explode in the oven.

How to save your mistakes

After my initial panic stage, which turned into a finding out what was wrong stage. I finally entered the last stage - problem solving stage.

What was going to do with cookies that were exploding with chocolate and were practically the most unaesthetic thing ever?

Well, I knew that no matter how the cookies looked, they would all still tastes equally as yummy in the end. The main thing I had to worry about was how I was going to get my cute pictures (especially that initial scene of the chocolate oozing out) since my cookies didn't look too pretty and practically all the chocolate they had was spilled out. The first thing I remembered to do was to reshape the cookies. If you face a similar issue where your cookies just turn into the weirdest shapes (which I cant even name), let me give you a little life hack - take anything that is circular, could be a cup, a cookie cutter or even a spoon, and find some way of circling around your cookie and molding it to be a perfect cute little circle! This works every single time and will help you get the nicest pictures to post on your Instagram.

For the pools of chocolate that were super messy, I decided to just cut them off which was a weird thing to do as I thought the chocolate would still be in a super liquid form when it came out of the oven. However, because the pools were so thin, the chocolate actually had time to bake and solidify a bit again, so it was fairly easy to get rid of that issue. Last issue, the cookie bomb video. Listen, I REALLY REALLY wanted to have this clip of the chocolate explosion super bad because that was the viral scene that I saw whenever I searched up this dessert on my tik tok fyp. Thankfully, out of 5, one of the cookies still had a super molten chocolate centre that though, did not look surer aesthetic on the outside, held a lot of chocolate on the inside, giving me that oozey goozey chocolate scene!!

Brown butter (I've made an improvement!)

If you have been following through with my recent blog on the easter cookie pods, you would have seen the catastrophe I went through when I burnt both my caramel and my brown butter in the same day. As I promised that I would try to make brown butter soon again, this time without burning it, I'm very proud to finally announce that I made a batch of brown butter to use in this recipe without burning it!!

The hack is exactly like I said before, cube up your butter into small pieces, burn over medium heat and the moment it turns lightly brown and you can smell that nutty aroma, take it off hte heat and let the residual heat from the pan slowly caramelise the milk bits more. As much as I can give you a million tips, the best way to actually learn how to do this is to try it out yourself and see how far you can get (: While this recipe did not call for brown butter, I could not resist from making that alteration to the recipe because brown butter just makes it SOO GOOD! glad to say now that I properly did brown butter, I can actually taste the difference in the cookies. If you ever want to just feel a little fancier, up your baking game, trust me, wait the extra 5 minutes and brown your butter.

Recipe