The 10-Minute Chocolate Dessert I Can’t Stop Making

Dessert is a non-negotiable in my house—it can be as simple as a piece of dark chocolate or some homemade chocolate chip cookies. But when I have dinner guests, I’d rather not pull out my personal chocolate bar stash at the end of the meal.

Perhaps this is why I’ve recently fallen madly in love with a microwave pudding cake recipe from Samantha Seneviratne. Pudding cakes are culinary magic in their own right. Layering the cake ingredients and then pouring boiling water over them before baking makes for a dessert that has a cake-like texture over a pool of lush, warm pudding. As if that weren’t impressive enough, making this kind of cake in minutes in the microwave will absolutely blow your mind.

Here’s how to make your new favorite dinner party dessert. 

How To Make This 10-Minute Chocolate Pudding Cake 

You can find the recipe for Samantha Seneviratne’s Microwave Chocolate Pudding Cake on the New York Times Cooking website or access the recipe in the description of this NYT Cooking Video on YouTube. Don’t be put off by the ingredient list—you’ll use several of the same ingredients twice. 

Start by melting some butter in a microwave-safe dish. A small 1.5 to 2-quart dish is recommended, but it doesn’t matter if it’s square or round. A glass or ceramic pie dish is great for this! A generous amount of brown sugar is mixed into the melted butter. Then milk, vanilla extract, and some optional instant coffee are whisked into the butter—that’s right, we’re mixing this cake right in the cooking dish.

Flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt are added to the milk mixture. Finally, the cake mixture gets topped with a blend of more brown sugar and more cocoa with a pinch of salt. Right before the cake goes into the microwave, you’ll pour boiling water over the whole thing without mixing it in. 

The cake gets cooked in the microwave for five to seven minutes. You can peek at the cake for doneness at any time, so start with a shorter cooking time and add 30 seconds as needed. The cake will boil and bubble with a sponge-like cake layer rising to the top and the pudding layer forming underneath.

Tips for Making Microwave Chocolate Pudding Cake 

While the pudding cake gets mixed in its cooking dish, you can dirty even fewer dishes by using a kitchen scale, two bowls, and a measuring cup. Weigh the first dose of brown sugar into a small bowl, then measure the milk into a one-cup liquid measure and add the vanilla extract and instant coffee, if using.

Finally, measure the dry ingredients (flour, dose one of cocoa, baking powder, and baking soda) into a medium bowl. Once you’ve mixed these ingredients into the baking dish, you can reuse the small bowl to measure and mix up the brown sugar-cocoa mixture and reuse the liquid measuring cup for the boiling water. 

The longer you cook the pudding cake, the more cake you’ll have but less pudding, and vice versa. Serving this warm with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream makes it feel decadent and fancy, even though it takes less than 10 minutes to put together.