This recipe is an early Halloween special, it’s a Halloween Pumpkin Chocolate soufflé recipe!

I was thinking for a while of what dish should I make for Halloween this year, and then, Gronda had announced their chocolate soufflé challenge in collaboration with Valrhona. So, it made all kind of sense for me to combine these 2 events and make a special Halloween Pumpkin Chocolate Soufflé.

*Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I just could not find any actual tiny pumpkins this early in the season. But! I found a perfect mini-squash! So, let’s just pretend it’s a tiny-pumpkin here… Besides, due to a selection of fall spices, that I’ve used for this recipe, it tastes just like Starbucks’ famous pumpkin spice latte? only with chocolate.

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Ingredients for the Halloween Pumpkin Chocolate Soufflé:

  • 150g Milk
  • 10g Corn starch
  • 147g 70% Chocolate
  • 30g Egg yolks
  • 40g Sugar
  • 1/2 tsp Cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp Nutmeg
  • 1/4 tsp Ginger
  • 100g Egg whites
  • 5 tiny pumpkins (app. 10-15cm in diameter)
  • Extra sugar
  • Extra butter

Directions:

  1. Cut the tops off your tiny pumpkins and clean them inside. Remove all the seeds and smooth the inner walls with a dull side of your knife.
  2. Preheat your oven to 170F and put your pumpkins inside to dehydrate for about 2 hours.
  3. You can also, slice the flash that you’ve cut from inside of your pumpkin and dehydrate it as well for the spice mix & decoration.
  4. Mix milk* with starch and put it on heat to activate the starch and thicken the milk. Simmer for a bit in order to properly cook through the starch.
  5. Set up the double boiler, melt the chocolate in 2 steps (see the video for details), temper it with a little of thickened milk and mix it with all the rest of the milk until smooth.
  6. Mix yolks with sugar, temper the mixture with a little of chocolate mix and then just the same, mix it with all the rest of the chocolate mix.
  7. Add spices.
  8. Whisk the egg whites on high speed in a stand mixer until firm picks.
  9. Add 1/3 of the egg whites in the chocolate mixture, whisk them in. Then, add the rest of the puffed egg whites and now gently fold them in, trying not to break the air pockets that you’ve just created with a whisk.
  10. Preheat the oven to 374F.
  11. Smooth the inner walls of your dry pumpkins with butter and dust with sugar**.
  12. Pour the chocolate soufflé inside the pumpkins all the way to the top.
  13. Bake for 12 min and let them cool down for extra 5 min inside the oven***.
  14. Decorate & serve within 3 minutes that the soufflé leaves the oven.

*If you wish, you can go even further with the milk, and infuse it with the remaining on pumpkin flesh, to give it even more complex taste.

**When making soufflés, dusting ramekins (or pumpkins in this case) with sugar is a MUST. We don’t do it for extra sweetness, we do it here for the functionality. While soufflé rises inside a ramekin, sugar helps it to slide along the walls upwards, while remaining a flat top. If you refrain from sugar, soufflé will stick to the walls and will create a rounded top, which is not desirable for a classical soufflé.

***If you take you Soufflés out of the oven too early, not letting them to cool down a bit, you will shock them with a much lower temperature and it would be very likely for them to collapse.

Ingredients for the Halloween Pumpkin Chocolate Soufflé decoration:

  • 95g Egg whites
  • 95g Icing sugar
  • 1/2 tsp Cream of Tartar
  • Dehydrated pumpkin slices (from above)
  • 1 tsp Cinnamon
  • 1 tsp Nutmeg
  • 1 tsp Ginger

Directions:

  1. Set up a double-boiler and whisk in egg whites, icing sugar & cream of tartar. Keep on whisking until this mixture reached an internal temperature of 160F.
  2. Transfer the mixture in another bowl, set up a stand mixer and continue whisking on high speed until firm peaks.
  3. Pipe the meringue mixture on top of the freshly baked Pumpkin Soufflés.
  4. Heat a knife with a torch and cut off the top of your meringues.
  5. Sprinkle with spices & enjoy!

If you want to learn other cool culinary techniques, click HERE.

You can also see more of my video recipes HERE.