Chocolate Souffles

We celebrated Valentine's Day last night since I had the flu last weekend. All our recipes came from the internet. We made Shrimp Bisque from The Gracious Bowl. We halved their recipe since we had just under a pound of shrimp in the freezer. It was very good and we have plenty of leftovers.

We knew we wanted a chocolate dessert and after seeing Chocolate Souffles on the Minimalist last week we decided to give them a try. We assembled them before we made the soup, but we were puzzled in trying to find a container to bake them in. I'd assumed our ramekins would work, but the recipe said they needed to hold two-cups and ours only hold one cup. I could imagine souffle rising to overflow the sides and making a huge mess in the oven. We looked at our onion soup bowls, but those were too big. Finally we realized that we had plenty of pint wide-mouth canning jars. They were exactly two cups in volume and had great straight sides to support the rise of the souffle. My husband buttered them and coated them with sugar. We made the souffle batter and divided it between the two jars. The clear glass made it rather nice, you could see how evenly you were dividing the batter. The swirls of batter and the sugared glass was pretty as well.
We refrigerated them until we were finishing up dinner preparations. Then we let them sit at room temperature for a while before baking. They came out of the oven after 20 minutes having risen half way in the remaining space of the jar. They were wonderfully gooey in the middle and light on the outside and a great treat to end the evening.