Expert Tips: Le Jeune Chef's signature chocolate soup

Want a new way to satisfy that chocolate craving?

Le Jeune Chef Restaurant’s pastry chef, Lynn Sisino, and part-time baker, Patrick Hufnagle (a baking and pastry arts/applied management student) share the recipe for this much-craved Le Jeune Chef specialty: chocolate ganache lightened with cream, surrounding a coffee flan. In the restaurant – a live-learning lab for culinary and baking and pastry arts students – it is garnished with fresh berries, white and dark chocolate shavings, and Chantilly cream.

Servings: 15-18

FLAN

• 2 1/4 cups milk
• 1 1/2 teaspoons instant coffee
• 5 eggs
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/8 teaspoon salt

Add milk and coffee to a pan and heat just enough to dissolve the coffee.

Whisk together eggs, sugar, salt and vanilla. Continue whisking as you gradually add the warm coffee mixture, so as not to scramble the eggs.

Strain through a fine sieve and pour into greased 2-ounce ramekins.

Bake in a water bath for 40 minutes.

Refrigerate overnight (or at least 4 hours).

SOUP

• 15 ounces semisweet chocolate (chips or chopped)
• 1 quart heavy cream
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup hazelnut butter or 4 ounces Frangelico or 4 ounces hazelnut syrup

Place chocolate in a large bowl.

On stove, bring cream and sugar to a boil and stir until sugar is dissolved.

Pour cream and sugar mixture over chocolate and let steep for 2 minutes. Add hazelnut butter or Frangelico, and whisk together until smooth. Cool. Strain and pour into a pitcher.

TO SERVE

Place flan in the center of a soup bowl. Pour soup around flan. Place fruit in soup, top flan with whipped cream, and sprinkle the dessert with chocolate shavings.

To be sure the sugar is dissolved, check the back of your utensil to see whether any sugar crystals are stuck to it.

Instead of a hazelnut product, change the flavor of the soup by using vanilla or a liqueur that pairs well with chocolate, such as Grand Marnier.

Instead of ramekins, flan can be baked in a single pie plate and spooned into the soup bowls.