Flourless Chocolate Cake

Recipes and photos from Jodi Mitchell
12 October 2011

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I’m gluten free, and I have to admit, with the odd exception, I prefer to eat food that is made to naturally be gluten free – i.e. it was never designed to have any gluten anywhere near it to begin with!  This is one of those recipes, and will be enjoyed by all (in fact, with this particular batch I received several remarks of ‘this is the best chocolate cake I’ve ever tasted!).
I served it with berries and cream, dessert style, but it’s equally delicious smothered in a rich chocolate ganache as a celebration cake, or dusted with icing sugar as an everyday cake.

Makes 1 cake or 12 individual serves

150g Dark Chocolate (I used Whitakers 72% Dark Cacao, if I could have been bothered travelling a bit further I would have gone for a high quality Belgium 70% dark cooking chocolate – you will taste the quality of the chocolate, so avoid any compound style cooking chocolates like the plague!)
150g Unsalted Butter
6 Eggs
1 Cup Castor Sugar
1 Cup Ground Almonds
4 tsp Cocoa Powder

To serve, you’ll want

Cream whipped with icing sugar and vanilla & berries (defrosted frozen work fantastically)
Or, ice with chocolate ganache, or dust lightly with icing sugar

Preheat your oven to 180°C, line either the base of your cake tin, or a 12 pan muffin tray for individual serves (the lining is necessary, a slight grease won’t cut this one!).

Melt the chocolate and butter together, double boiler style (a glass bowl over a saucepan of boiled water will do the trick).  Put it to the side to cool a little once it’s melted.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs and castor sugar.  You’ll need an electric mixer of some sort for this part – doing it by hand is not for the faint hearted (I wouldn’t go there).  It should triple or so in volume, become nice and pale and resemble the texture of mousse.

Fold the ground almonds and cocoa powder gently through your egg mixture, being careful to keep movement/mixing to a minimum, you want that air to stay in there for a nice light cake.  Finally, fold the melted chocolate/butter mixture through.

Pour into your prepared tins and pop into the oven.  Unlike a lot of ‘gluten free’ cakes, this one will rise a little, so take that into account when filling your tins.  For a large single cake, cooking time should be about 35-45 minutes, for individual ‘texas muffin’ sized cakes, 20-25 minutes. 

Leave it in it’s tin to cool (pop it on top of a wire rack still), and cover it with a tea towel once the steam has left it – this will help stop the top from getting hard.

When it’s cool, get it out of the tin and do whatever you’ve decided to do to serve it!