Flourless Chocolate Cake. Really.

It's a bit odd for me to post a cake recipe as my first proper post because I have never really been a master baker.  I'm not really big on precise measurements and accurate timings and with baking, if I understand it correctly, if even the tiniest speck of flour ends up in the wrong place you have an irreversible disaster on your hands.  

Admittedly, I have had surprising success with an extremely good Nigel Slater chocolate cake (from Appetite, I think) which a friend and I later discovered in a basic crumb format hanging off the whiskers of my (sadly departed) houserabbit Mr Snickers, who disappeared in a cloud of flour when I plonked him back on the floor.  I have also produced a pretty extraordinary gingerbread house, which I hope to one day recreate and photograph for this blog.  As a rule, however, I try to leave the bread and cakes to my ex-flatmate Amy: living with her I would be woken on a Saturday morning by the divine smell of hot cross buns seeping under my door; or would stumble home at 3am to find a huge stack of profiteroles piled up on the table.   Now I think of it, actually, I can't quite believe I moved out.

But I digress.  Last week my sister had a birthday.  I haven't celebrated one with her for the best part of twenty years and, since I'm crashing in her spare room for five weeks, I decided that it would be frankly uncouth of me to not produce a vast, chocolate-based tower of sponge for her special day.  My sister is, like me - and our dear mother - a gluten-free diner (though far more stoic than yours frequently-lapsing truly) and so a flourless sort of a cake was in order.  Sounds ludicrous, I know, but you will thank yourself for sticking with me on this.  Thanks to recipezaar.com - I am lost without my cookery books - I found something that fitted the bill, and ten bars of Lindt, a few beaten eggs and an awful lot of cream later, we were all sitting around the table with 

chocolate smeared on our faces and our hands rubbing our swelling bellies.  I of course share the recipe with you below, recommending that you serve it with whipped cream and some kind of fruit (we went through raspberries, blueberries and bananas in the entire week it took the two of us to complete consumption, so rich this beast of a cake is).  I would also mention that it seemed to taste even better from day 2 onwards, so you might want to make it the day before, although I accept no blame for it not making it to the day after.

Anyway, this Flourless Chocolate Cake is possibly written by an American celebrity chef (ugh) called Emeril Lagasse, so credit is to be pointed in that direction.  And for this cake 

one requires:

• 8 tablespoons of butter.  I am afraid I don't know how much this is in Sensible Measurements, but over here (in the America) the butter comes in sticks and has lines up the side marking out tablespoons, which is clearly ridiculous but obviously works for someone
  
• 16 ounces semisweet chocolate, which is very nearly ten big bars of the fancy thin business.  Honest to god
  
• 5 large eggs, room temperature, separated (always a laugh)
  
• 3/4 cup of sugar (I know, I know...)
  
• 2 teaspoons of vanilla essence 
  
• 1/2 a teaspoon of salt
  
• 1/2 a cup of cream.  Nobody mentioned specifics, but the only cream I could find at the Farmer's Market down the road was some hideous "extra-thick whipping cream" that turned out to have all the weight and substance of an dandelion clock and it turned out fine, so I wouldn't worry yourself too much.
  

First off, preheat your oven to 350f/175c/gas mark 4 and grease a cake-shaped pan of about 9" across with one of your teaspoons of butter.

Now then.  Take 8 ounces of the chocolate and break it into small pieces before introducing it, together with the rest of the butter, to one of those bowl-in-a-saucepan-with-boiling-water-in scenarios, all the time using great willpower to not stick your fingers in.

In another bowl, mix together the egg yolks with the sugar by what ever means you fancy; mixer or electric whisk, say, and then gently stir it into the melted chocolate (although if you do it the other way round you'll save on washing up later because you can reuse the chocolate bowl).  Then beat your egg whites and salt together and fold them in too.  I hate all this "folding" business but apparently if you don't do it slowly and carefully, it won't come out right.  I thought baking was meant to be fun.  Anyway, before you start wondering whether it's alright to taste it or not (what with the raw eggs and everything), transfer the mixture into your cake tin and stick it in the oven for 40 minutes: I seem to remember my mother once saying something about a sponge being ready when you can slide a sharp knife into the middle without bringing any of the cake back out with it, and on this occasion that worked perfectly well for me.

Somewhat tediously, you are now expected to wait for the cake to cool, probably on some kind of criss-crossy metal thing or even on the base of the cake tin if you've got a fancy springform pan.  To pass the time, however, instead of repeatedly poking the sponge with your finger in the vain hope that some cake accidentally falls off, you can get on with making the icing.  'Icing' is, I feel in this instance, an entirely inaccurate use of the word, since all you're doing is pouring melted chocolate and cream all over the top of the cake, but who am I to argue.  Simply warm the rest of chocolate as before, stirring the cream in as you go, and hey presto, you can cover the cake with it, wait for it to cool off a bit and then stick your face right in.  Surprisingly simple, devastatingly effective and no-one will even notice it's gluten-free.