"I WOULD RATHER HAVE YOU SIT ON MY FACE after a brisk walk on a warm day
than suffer through that fucking lava cake again." That line, undeniably the highlight of the 2014 Jon Favreau movie Chef, is tweeted at the titular character by Oliver Platt's villainous food critic, who swiftly adds that the cake is "irrelevant."
While his social media smackdown may have been fictional, the sentiment -- that chocolate lava cake is clichéd and passé -- is all too real. These days, the ubiquitous dessert, a single-serving warm chocolate cake with a runny chocolaty center, is most closely associated with kitschy Valentine's Day dinners and chains touting buy-one-get-one-free appetizer deals. The molten chocolate cake has become so common that, in 2013, food writer Mark Bittman once heralded it as "the Big Mac of desserts."
But the chocolate lava cake -- also known as chocolate truffle cake -- hasn't always elicited the same groans of "basicness" as a Pumpkin Spice Latte. In its prime, it was viewed as the pinnacle of fine-dining desserts, a complex dish aspiring chefs strived to master and established chefs clamored to put on their menus. "If creme brulee was the most popular dessert of the 1980s," wrote pastry chef Sherry Yard in her cookbook Desserts by the Yard, "chocolate truffle cake was the favorite of the '90s." https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/chocolate-lava-cake-dominos-dessert-history/food-and-drink
