Darker than Black, Week 9: Flourless Chocolate Cake
I was going to save this for later, after I had gotten a few more entries down, but the cycle of the year threw off my efforts. This week I bring you a special Passover edition, since while the chocolate I was going to use doesn't have flour, it does have yeast extract, and the other chocolates are artisanal small-batch fair trade chocolate without listed ingredients. In furtherance of the fence around the Torah, I figured this would be a good alternative. Plus it gives me a week to find something for next weekend, and if I can’t, I’ll skip a week and come back with a surprise the week after. Trust me, it’ll be worth the extra time.
softlykarou first made flourless chocolate cake in Japan, in a rice cooker because we didn't have an oven. She's refined her recipe over the years and now has dialed it down to five ingredients: cacao powder, eggs, sugar, butter, and chocolate. It has fewer ingredients than some of the chocolates than we've already covered, actually. And it's tasty.
Before the preparations
I don't like a lot of store-bought flourless chocolate cakes because they're too sweet. What I like about softlykarou's recipe is that while it does have sugar, it has the minimum amount necessary to function. Eaten by itself, it tastes less sugary to me than any dark chocolate less than about 70% cacao. That's fine because I can add vanilla ice cream to provide the sweetness, while doing that with store cakes leads to a horribly sugary mess. I put it in the microwave for twenty seconds, by the end of which its already bubbling from the heat, then put a bunch of vanilla ice cream on top and serve. The ice cream and cake reach an equilibrium almost immediately, with minimal ice cream melting and I've never been burned by the cake. And while it's extraordinarily rich, I can eat huge mountains of it without any problems.
It's perhaps a good thing that softlykarou usually only makes it in small batches and doesn't make it at all except for special occasions or if I directly ask her for it. I already eat a truly enormous amount of chocolate just in the bars that we buy from the store. If we consistently had flourless chocolate cake in the house...well. Our grocery bills would be a lot higher, is all I’m going to say.
You can see the gooey chocolate mass at the bottom of the picture there.
softlykarou’s Opinion:The only disappointment in this cake is that I didn't grease the pan enough so it stuck to the bottom.
However, I like this cake. It's very rich so I can eat a small amount of it and still feel like I've gotten my chocolate fix. The vanilla ice cream was a good touch because I heated mine up a little too much so the ice cream likely saved me from burning my tongue. I'd make it again with even darker chocolate because it's a bit on the sweet side for me.
It definitely doesn't taste so sweet to me, which is odd because softlykarou usually has (slightly) more of a sweet tooth than I do. I’m not going to complain about making it darker, though. Maybe with just baking chocolate, letting all the sweetness come from the small amount of sugar added and the ice cream. Or that French Broad 100% chocolate if we can get our hands on a sufficient quantity of it. I feel like that would go really well into a cake like this.
Chag Pesach Sameach, everyone!
softlykarou first made flourless chocolate cake in Japan, in a rice cooker because we didn't have an oven. She's refined her recipe over the years and now has dialed it down to five ingredients: cacao powder, eggs, sugar, butter, and chocolate. It has fewer ingredients than some of the chocolates than we've already covered, actually. And it's tasty.
Before the preparations
I don't like a lot of store-bought flourless chocolate cakes because they're too sweet. What I like about softlykarou's recipe is that while it does have sugar, it has the minimum amount necessary to function. Eaten by itself, it tastes less sugary to me than any dark chocolate less than about 70% cacao. That's fine because I can add vanilla ice cream to provide the sweetness, while doing that with store cakes leads to a horribly sugary mess. I put it in the microwave for twenty seconds, by the end of which its already bubbling from the heat, then put a bunch of vanilla ice cream on top and serve. The ice cream and cake reach an equilibrium almost immediately, with minimal ice cream melting and I've never been burned by the cake. And while it's extraordinarily rich, I can eat huge mountains of it without any problems.
It's perhaps a good thing that softlykarou usually only makes it in small batches and doesn't make it at all except for special occasions or if I directly ask her for it. I already eat a truly enormous amount of chocolate just in the bars that we buy from the store. If we consistently had flourless chocolate cake in the house...well. Our grocery bills would be a lot higher, is all I’m going to say.
You can see the gooey chocolate mass at the bottom of the picture there.
softlykarou’s Opinion:The only disappointment in this cake is that I didn't grease the pan enough so it stuck to the bottom.
However, I like this cake. It's very rich so I can eat a small amount of it and still feel like I've gotten my chocolate fix. The vanilla ice cream was a good touch because I heated mine up a little too much so the ice cream likely saved me from burning my tongue. I'd make it again with even darker chocolate because it's a bit on the sweet side for me.
It definitely doesn't taste so sweet to me, which is odd because softlykarou usually has (slightly) more of a sweet tooth than I do. I’m not going to complain about making it darker, though. Maybe with just baking chocolate, letting all the sweetness come from the small amount of sugar added and the ice cream. Or that French Broad 100% chocolate if we can get our hands on a sufficient quantity of it. I feel like that would go really well into a cake like this.
Chag Pesach Sameach, everyone!