Tara O Brady/The Globe and Mail
Molten chocolate cake is arguably the dessert most tightly bound to Valentine’s Day, first gaining fine-dining fame in the 1990s before slowly sliding out of favour and into cultural cliché.
This February stalwart, alternatively called a chocolate truffle cake or lava cake, has disputed beginnings. Even though chef Michel Bras’s
coulant, with flowing ganache miraculously ensconced in cake, debuted six years prior to the “happy accident” of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s unintentionally underbaked version in 1987, Vongerichten historically claimed invention. (He was catering for a large group and failed to take into account how the mass of so many cakes in the oven would affect the oven’s efficiency.) Meanwhile, Jacques Torres argued such softly oozing treats,