It’s Valentine’s Day Weekend and that means really only one thing in the food world—chocolate. I took a poll on my Instagram stories at the beginning of the week asking if people preferred chocolate desserts or pink desserts and I truly don’t even know why I asked. Chocolate is always the winner. My perfect Valentine’s dessert (or honestly anytime dessert) is very simple, very rich, very gooey, and often salted. So basically, little lava cakes.

Back about 7 years ago or so, I pinned a recipe on Pinterest for molten cakes baked in muffin tins. It was from a very random blog, with a poor, artificially lit photo (one that would never stand on my carefully curated Pinterest boards of today!), and my sister-in-law decided to try out the recipe. They were a hit. We made them for party desserts. We made them for my other sister-in-law’s freezer when she had her first baby. I took them on road trips. We just became best friends. And then, like Jessie and her little girl owner in Toy Story 2, we grew apart. Other flashy recipes caught my attention. I started laminating doughs and layering cakes and going to pastry school. Fast forward to about a year ago, I had a craving for lava cakes and set out to sort through thousands of pins to find the recipe, and it was gone! Of course, I had never written the recipe down, so I set out to make my own perfect little molten lava cake recipe and here we are. These lava cakes are the product of lots of testing, lots of suffering through too dry or not-cooked-enough cakes, but we made it friends.

about the spiced caramel

You guys know I can’t just give you a normal, caramel lava cake recipe. It’s against my nature! So here, we spice our caramel with fennel seeds, cardamom pods, and black peppercorns. The spices give a little added flavor contrast to the chocolate and help to cut through some of the sweetness. It’s made using a traditional wet caramel, meaning sugar is cooked with water (which helps prevent that pesky sugar crystallization) until it turns a deep amber color. Heavy cream that has been steeped with your spices gets added, followed by butter and salt. Make sure to chill the caramel well, so that it’s scoop-able when filling the cakes or it will ooze out the sides during baking!

about the lava cakes

The actual cakes themselves are fairly straightforward here. All of your favorite ingredients make an appearance- flour, sugar, brown sugar, butter, eggs, and chocolate. The cakes get baked in muffin tins and the batter can be actually be chilled and baked off later if you want to make them ahead. You can also freeze and wrap baked cakes individually and heat them in the microwave, although you do lose a little of that molten middle. Still chocolate-y and still delicious. They are really the most perfect Valentine’s day treat.