Week 15: Flourless Chocolate Cake

I feel a little sad writing this post because I baked this cake over two weeks ago and now I have to look at photos and remember how fabulous it tasted and how I don’t have any left to savor. Alas, this post needs to be written so I can get back in the kitchen!

This recipe came highly recommended by my friend, Linda, who baked my Dr. Devil’s Food Cake for James Earl Jones. And she got this recipe from her friend, Lynne Silver. On the printed recipe she gave me, she noted it’s “the only flourless chocolate cake I’ve tasted that’s not dry.” I made a flourless chocolate cake a few years ago. It turned out well, but I recall it had 1/2 cup of cocoa powder in it. And this recipe has a mere 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder in it… and a lot of butter and eggs, so I knew it would be delightfully dense and moist.

I think it’s important for any home baker to have a good flourless chocolate recipe on hand. It’s great for Passover and perfect for serving to gluten free guests.

The ingredients for this cake were very simple. The only thing I didn’t initially have on hand were the bars of chocolate.

The first step was to melt the chocolate and butter over a double boiler. I used to ignore recipes that mentioned the double-boiler method. It sounded so technical and I thought I needed special equipment. But it’s not as complicated as it sounds. You simply fill a sauce pan with about an inch of water and nestle a heat-safe bowl inside the sauce pan, ensuring it does not touch the water. Depending on how your bowl is shaped, it can be a bit of a balancing act, so I do recommend wearing an oven mitt so you can hold the bowl in place as you stir.

While the chocolate and butter were melting, I beat the egg whites to soft peaks in a medium bowl. The whites went from this:

To this:

Once the chocolate and butter were melted, I transferred the mixture to a larger mixing bowl. I then whisked in the egg yolks and vanilla. Next I sifted in the sugar, salt, and cocoa powder.

The final step was to fold in the whipped egg whites in three parts.

I poured the batter into a greased 8″ pan with a parchment round on the bottom. I’m not terribly sure the batter was supposed to be as marbled as it was, but I was nervous about over mixing it, which might cause the egg whites to collapse.

The cake baked about 30 minutes at 350 degrees. When I took it out of the oven, it looked a little lopsided, even though I rotated my pans halfway through. And then I remembered how I have even baking strips for the purpose of preventing this and I had completely forgotten to use them!

A few minutes later, the cake collapsed a bit.

While it flipped out of the pan just fine, it looked a little uneven around the edges.

Once cooled, I transferred it to a cake stand and I realized the unevenness on the bottom was pretty obvious as well. Pay no mind to the shirtless man in the background of this photo, that’s just my boyfriend. Remember Chris? I baked him a PB&J Cake for his birthday in January. 😉

The less than perfect appearance of the cake seemed like nothing a little powdered sugar couldn’t fix.

Voila!

I served this cake to my writing group which consists of Linda, who gave me this recipe, and Ann. Linda and Ann have been my sounding board for  a good deal of the content on this website. They’ve listened to months worth of pieces on the intricacies of frosting consistency, my life in cake, and how I melted my cutting board in my oven, among other food themed stories. It was about time they got a taste of the project.

I was thrilled with how this cake tasted. It had a deliciously moist brownie or mousse-like consistency. This recipe’s a keeper.