Recipe: Karen Martini’s Family-Recipe Chocolate Pudding Sauces Itself

What’s better than chocolate pudding? The kind that luxuriates in a chocolate sauce heated in the same baking tin, of course. Trust Karen Martini – beloved chef, author and presenter – to bring home the goods. It’s a family recipe from the second of two new kitchen counter staples (Cook: Green and Cook: Sweet) and is prepped and ready to feed your family in under an hour. 

“My mother often cooked this dessert in the colder months, though the credit for this version goes to my sister, Odette,” Martini writes. “I have added the salt flakes, as I love a bit of a savoury touch.”

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Self-saucing chocolate pudding by Karen Martini

Serves 6
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 35 minutes

Ingredients

160g self-raising flour
120g caster sugar
2 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder
0.5 tsp fine sea salt
150ml full-cream milk
1 egg
1 egg yolk
200g dark chocolate (56 per cent cocoa or higher)
20g unsalted butter

Topping

250g soft brown sugar
1.5 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
350ml boiling water
1½ tsp salt flakes

To serve

Icing sugar, for dusting
Vanilla ice-cream

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Whisk the flour, sugar, cocoa powder and salt in a bowl.

In another bowl, beat the milk, egg and egg yolk with a fork until combined.

Add the chocolate and butter to a heatproof bowl and place over a saucepan of simmering water for about 5 minutes, ensuring the bowl doesn’t touch the water. When two-thirds of the chocolate has melted, stir through twice. Remove the bowl to finish melting the chocolate in the residual heat.

Once the chocolate has fully melted, fold in the egg mixture to combine, then follow with the flour mixture to make a pourable batter.

Tip the mixture into an ovenproof dish, measuring about 20cm x 28cm, with sides at least 5cm high. Smooth flat with a spatula.

For the topping, combine the sugar and cocoa powder, then sprinkle evenly over the batter. Pour the boiling water over in a zig-zag pattern, then sprinkle with the salt.

Bake for about 35 minutes, until the pudding resembles a chocolate brownie, with a slight bubbling of sauce at the side.

Dust with icing sugar and serve warm, straight from the dish at the table, with ice cream.

This is an edited extract from Cook: Sweet by Karen Martini published by Hardie Grant Books on May 1, 2026. Photography by Armelle Habib.