Chocolate Sauce

The recipe, step by step

Homemade chocolate sauce is a quick and easy silky smooth, creamy topping that is perfect with ice cream, pancakes, great for dipping and so many other cakes or desserts.

This delicious sauce can be served either hot or cold, and it’s easy to swap out some of the ingredients to make it vegan too.

This chocolate sauce goes perfectly with so many desserts, like praline pear meringue cake, raspberry lime panna cotta or raspberry vanilla custard profiteroles.

INGREDIENTS

For this chocolate sauce recipe, all you need are these 6 ingredients:

• Double or heavy cream– creates creaminess and consistency.

• Caster or granulated white sugar – adds sweetness.

• Vanilla – I use Taylor & Colledge vanilla products, they add a delicious taste to your recipes and enhance the other ingredient flavours: pure vanilla extract, vanilla paste or vanilla pods.

• Dark or milk chocolate – choose your favourite chocolate for that beautiful rich flavour.

Chocolate recommendations: bars – Lindt Excellence dark 70% bar 100g, Montezuma’s darkside 51% bar 90g, Menier dark cooking chocolate 100g, Green and Black’s Organic dark Chocolate 100g, 1kg bags – Callebaut dark chocolate, Callebaut milk chocolate, Callebaut white chocolate.

• Butter – adds structure and flavour. I use salted butter for most of my baking as it intensifies the flavours, but feel free to use unsalted if you prefer.

• Cocoa powder – adds a beautiful rich chocolate flavour.

Cocoa recommendations: Dr. Oetker fine dark cocoa powder or not as dark – Sevenhills wholefoods organic cacao powder

• Salt – I highly recommend adding a good pinch of salt to your sweet sauces. It would seem counterproductive, but it’s not, I promise. Salt helps balance out the sweetness and richness. It also elevates the other ingredients, bringing out the best characteristics of any sauce recipe. In a seemingly absurd or contradictory way, salt intensifies the mouth’s ability to taste sweetness. Sodium sends signals to move glucose into the sweet taste receptor cells in our tongue, triggering the cells to register sweetness. The result is that salt not only alerts our ‘salt sensitivity’, but also our ‘sweet sensitive’ taste buds. I recommend Maldon Sea salt flakes or Cornish sea salt.

WHAT VARIATIONS CAN I MAKE?

Nutrition

Serving: one chocolate sauce serving (2.5 tbsp)

Nutrition information is provided as an estimate and may vary depending on the ingredients and portion size used.

STORAGE AND FREEZING

This sauce will keep well in an airtight jar in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. It will solidify in the fridge so it will need to be left to come to room temperature or reheated gently.

Freezing: Not freezable, but it takes around 5 minutes to make if you have the ingredients at home.

EQUIPMENT SUGGESTIONS

Recommendations include:

• 3pc Silicone Balloon Whisk Set, Colourful Non Stick, 20cm/8″, 25cm/10″, 30cm/12″

The whisks are ideal for mixing hot and cold batters or creams. They come in three different sizes and are very colourful.

• Pyrex Measuring Jug 500ml | Capacity 568ml / 20 ounce 
• Pyrex Glass Measuring Jug, 1L

I think I have said it before that I am not a big fan of plastic, so I like this type of glass measuring jug for calculating my liquids.

• Milk Saucepan, 1 Litre With Double Sided Pouring Lips

This small pan is a great size for boiling small amounts of liquids and it has pouring lips built into the rim of the saucepan which makes it easy to use.

RECIPE TIPS

Thicker chocolate sauce – can be achieved by adding a couple of extra tablespoons of butter if you are going to serve it cold. It you want to serve it hot, add a teaspoon of cornflour with a little milk to the cream while it comes to the boil. Remember to stir the cream continuously to avoid lumps forming. If it does get a little lumpy simply pass it through a strainer.

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