Its become the “little black cocktail dress” of my baking repertoire! (If you’ll excuse the momentary gender crossover.) Everytime my family plans a celebration – a birthday, a farewell party, Christmas, or any of the other multitude of festivals that we celebrate here in India with a party – they always want me to make THE CHOCOLATE CAKE.
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| The kids ate most of the cake before I could take a picture! |
And its not like I haven’t had any practice at the recipe; I have been making this flourless chocolate cake for the past 10 to 15 years. In fact I seem to remember it was one of the first recipes I tried after I had bought famed food historian and cookery writer Claudia Roden’s magnum opus “The Book of Jewish Food” in the mid 1990s.
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| My faded copy of one of the world's classic cookbooks |
Ms Roden comments in the book that this is itself a much copied recipe which she originally published some 25 years earlier in “A Book of Middle Eastern Food”, another of her highly praised and awarded recipe collections. And I seem to recall this cake being around many a cafe in inner city Melbourne, Australia in the 1980s when I was living there; the trouble is my kids weren’t even born then so the novelty of it certainly hasn’t worn off on them!
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| Claudia Roden |
The recipe is straightforward enough: a mix of dark chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar and ground almonds. But somehow the chemistry of baking transforms these ingredients into an unctuous, heavily chocolate tasting cake that is usually served only a sliver at a time with fresh thick double cream as the ideal accompaniment. (Oh, how we miss the King Island Dairy and it’s cream here in Hyderabad!)
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| The chocolate cake with custard apple icecream |
Here in India we serve it with the best ice cream we can find ... which for us comes from Bombay’s “Natural Icecream Company” (there’s an outlet here in Banjara Hills). They have a range of natural fruit ice creams, made with no added preservatives or stabilisers, and one of the best is made with custard apples – also called sitaphal.
So, no matter that everytime I make this cake I feel like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day”, where his character is trapped in a snowbound country town and due to a timewarp is forced to repeat the same actions every single day of his life! No matter that I have baked cakes from the canons of other well known baking experts like David Lebovitz, Dorothy Greenspan and Dan Lepard.
They still always want the chocolate cake! And despite the fact that you can add to this recipe various enhancers like grated peel, dried fruit or a sympathetic alcohol, as my daughter said just before her birthday earlier this year: ”No nuts, no peels, no oranges, no rum .... just the chocolate!
So here it is .... my Groundhog Day Chocolate Cake recipe ... with thanks to Ms Roden, of course.
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| The cake has a dense outside crust and soft inner crumb |
The Chocolate Cake
Ingredients: 250 gms dark cooking chocolate 100gms butter 6 eggs, separated 75gms caster sugar 100gms ground blanched almonds
Method: Crush chocolate and then melt with butter in a bowl (I zap it in the microwave at 30 sec intervals, stirring in between). Beat egg yolks with the sugar until pale. Add the ground almonds and the melted chocolate and butter mixture and stir to incorporate.
In a separate bowl beat the egg whites until stiff (make sure the bowl is perfectly dry and clean and that there are no remnants of the yolks in the whites ... otherwise you won’t get body to the beaten whites). Fold into chocolate/almond mixture. Butter a 23cm/9“ cake tin and dust with flour. (I use cocoa powder so you don’t get a white lining on your finished cake.)
Bake in a pre-heated oven at 180C for approximately 45 minutes. Leave to cool. To serve - dust with powdered icing sugar though a sieve or slaver on a chocolate ganache made separately.
Warning: don’t blame me if everyone wants you to make it again and again!
Tony saab/Hyderabad July 2012
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