FLOURLESS CHOCOLATE CAKE

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Flourless chocolate cake- a gluten free, rich dark chocolate cake. Chocolate lovers will swoon over this dessert.

Gluten free flourless chocolate cake- a rich dark chocolate cake recipe

POST UPDATED on January 16, 2018: A rich dark, chocolate cake recipe that will please all the chocolate lovers in your life. Feel free to omit instant coffee powder or the grand mariner, if you like. While the cake is absolutely decadent with the ganache, I have made it without the ganache and a simple dusting of powdered sugar and it still works out to taste great. The pictures have been updated, although I have kept the above picture from the original post as a reminder for when I started shooting food. 

ORIGINAL POST:

Yesterday, it was our 6 month anniversary! (Saying that aloud reminds me of the How I Met Your Mother episode where Robin dumps her boyfriend for celebrating their weekly anniversary- she finds it gay!ouch!). Anywho, and hopefully not sounding gay, yesterday V and I completed 6 months of being together as a married couple. And for us, it was a big deal! Since we had two weddings- 19th March we had our Hindu wedding and 20th March our Sikh one, we get two days to celebrate our anniversary (I’m sure in the future it will be a handy excuse for someone who forgets our anniversary-‘Oh! For me, it will always be on the 20th!’).

Though we wished each other on 19th, I wanted to surprise V with a cake. And since 19th was a Sunday, a day when V is in the house the whole day, I decided to surprise him on the 20th. Because we ate out on 19th, he thought we already celebrated our anniversary and was clueless of the surprise I was cooking up or more like baking up. I am a genius!

Gluten free flourless chocolate cake- a rich dark chocolate cake recipe

So yesterday, I baked the cake in the morning, hid it in the guest room when he came home for lunch. Assembled the cake as soon as he left. Since I had to go for Zumba in the evening, I hid the cake in the fridge, so that when V came back from work he accidentally wouldn’t see the cake. And, luckily, I can trust him to not look inside the fridge when I am not there! When I came back from Zumba, V decided to go to the gym- great!, giving me time to set up surprise- candles, cake and the works.

Now, the cake wasn’t as great as I would have liked it to be. I wanted to like this recipe, I really did want to- its Julia Child’s. But, something just did not sit right with me when it came to the taste. Even though I like my chocolate bitter- the cake was more bitter than I would have liked. Yes, there were some issues with the ingredients- I did not have the required amount of bittersweet chocolate, so substituted a part of it with unsweetened chocolate and upped the sugar amount- but the cake was still quite bitter.

So instead of posting the recipe of the cake I made for our 6 month anniversary, I am posting the recipe for my famous (yes, I count something liked in my family as famous) flourless chocolate cake recipe which has consistently given me great results (the picture at the beginning of this post is of that same famous chocolate cake). The cake has more of a mousse-like texture and is really, really rich. So keep the portions small! The recipe is adapted from Bon Appetit, September ’08 issue.

Gluten free flourless chocolate cake- a rich dark chocolate cake recipe

FLOURLESS CHOCOLATE CAKE
 
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Serves: 1 10 inch cake
Ingredients
  • 1 cup water
  • ¾ cup sugar
  • 9 tbsp unsalted butter, diced
  • 18 ounces (500 gms) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped
  • 6 large eggs
  • ½ tsp instant coffee
  • 2 tbsp grand mariner (optional- instead add 1 tbsp vanilla essence)
  • pinch sea salt
Ganache
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 8 ounces (226gms) bittersweet chocolate, chopped
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 350 F/ 180 C. Butter a 10" diam springform pan. Line the bottom of the pan with parchment rounds. Butter the parchment. Wrap 3 layers of heavy duty foil around outside of the pan, bringing the foil to the top of the rim. (Like how one does for a cheesecake.)
  2. Combine 1 cup water & sugar in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Add the instant coffee powder and let simmer for 5 min. Remove from heat. Add the vanilla extract or grand mariner. Add the sea salt.
  3. Melt butter in a large saucepan over low heat. Add the chocolate & whisk until smooth. Whisk sugar syrup into the chocolate, cool slightly.
  4. Add eggs to the chocolate mix, one by one making sure to scrape the edges after each addition. Whisk until well blended. Pour batter into prepared pan. Place cake pan in a large roasting pan. Add enough hot water to the roasting pan to come halfway up sides of cake pan.
  5. Bake until the center no longer moves when the pan is gently shaken, about 50 min. Remove from the water bath. Transfer to a rack. Cool completely in the pan.
For the ganache
  1. Bring whipping cream to simmer in small saucepan over med heat. Remove from heat. Add the chocolate & whisk until smooth. Pour over top of cake still in pan. Gently shake pan to distribute ganache evenly over top of cake. Refrigerate cake in pan until ganache is set, about 2 hrs.
  2. Run a knife around the pan to loosen the cake & release sides.
  3. Cover with chocolate shavings & cocoa dusting.
  4. You can make the cake 2 days ahead. Cover & keep in the fridge.
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WHITE SPICE POUND CAKE

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White Spice Pound Cake | The Novice Housewife

This is the picture that went with the original post which was published within a few months of my first blog post ever. The first photo in this post is a photo of the same cake I shot almost 5 years later.

Generally a lot of recipes call for just egg yolks, and, as a result, you are left with too many egg whites on your hand. Scrambled eggs, egg white omelet, macaroons, meringues can be useful ways to use those left-over egg whites. Or, if you are the beauty-savvy kinds, you can use the egg whites as a rinse for your hair (you’ll smell of egg after that- but it conditions your hair like anything). High in protein and negligible in fat, its a good way to enjoy the benefits of egg and not add to the cholesterol levels in your body.

I had made custard the other day, and was left with the dilemma of how to use the left-over whites. I decided to make the White Spice Pound Cake from Rose Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible. The cake is soft and velvety and even though there are no egg yolks, the addition of cinnamon, cloves and brandy gives it a really rich flavor. I added nutmeg too, though the original recipe doesn’t ask for it.

One technique I have recently adopted while baking cakes, is to always spoon out the flour into the measuring cup instead of scooping the flour directly into the measuring cup. The best way to measure flour, of course, is by weighing, but since I don’t own a scale, I have read spooning it out into the measuring cup gives a more accurate measurement. It also aerates the flour, resulting in a light, moist cake.

white spice pound cake

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CHOCOLATE CHIP/CHUNK COOKIE

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New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookies

POST UPDATED on May 3, 2017 to add:  This is one of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe. The browned butter chocolate chip cookie that I also use and is up on the blog is a quick version for your chocolate chip cookies, but the 24 hours rest in the refrigerator does lend lovely textures to the cookie, and when I have time and am patient enough to wait for 24 hours this is the recipe I choose. I have also made these cookies half whole wheat and don’t mind the difference. The pictures have been updated, although I have kept the above picture from the original post as a reminder for when I started shooting food. 

ORIGINAL POST:

Two years back The New York Times came out with an article that was titled: “Perfection: Hint? It’s warm and has a secret”. A year back I read it and life, since then, has never been the same!

The article is an interesting read talking about the search for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. I don’t know how I stumbled upon it, but have made these cookies quite many times since then and it is definitely the best chocolate chip recipe I have tried yet!

New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookies

Fresh out of the oven they are just melt-in-your mouth- good. Believe me, they are best warm. I made them first thing in the morning today, because the 36 hour chilling rule to achieve the three texture goal (crunchy on the outside, soft on inside and a mix of both in between) got over at 4 am today. Wish I had got up an hour earlier so that V could have had them freshly baked. But, I got lazy!

They are so good fresh out of the oven that I actually called V up and told him to come back home immediately. He got really worried, asking what happened – is everything OK?And I was like- You HAVE to eat these warm! (Unfortunately, you can’t leave work to eat a freshly baked batch of cookies- life just doesn’t work that ways! Sigh!)

Not that they don’t taste that great afterwards, but freshly baked- well, even a bad cookie tastes great just out of the oven- so these, which are pretty pretty good, just taste freakingly awesome!

New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookies

Of all the times I have baked this dough recipe, this time had, by far, the best results. It could be because of the unsalted butter- a regular find here, but quite a rarity in India. All manufactured butters are salted, the unsalted kinds are imported and yes, very expensive. It could also be the experience- each time I make them, I learn something new. Next time I am going to add a little cream of tartar. I read somewhere, it gives that cracked look to the cookie (it does nothing to the taste, though) and I would like to see that look more prominent in my cookies.

Jacques Torres makes only 18 cookies out of the whole dough- so they are pretty huge. His are 6-inch affairs. And even though I would love to do that, it just meant having more calories at one go, which, for a person like me is a strict no-no. So I made mine 3 inches wide (yes, they are still big – big enough to enjoy the different textures, but not as harsh on your waistline as the 6 inch ones.)

I used chips instead of chunks, even though I prefer chunks. But since the baking chocolate I had was 54 % cacao content and Torres claims that it should be at least 60 %, if not more, I had to use the 60 % cacao content chips I had.

New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookies

I added toasted walnuts too. I like mine with nuts. But, since many do not like nuts in their chocolate chip cookies I learnt a trick I saw on Deb’s Smitten Kitchen website. She finely chops her nuts- some the size of peas but many more like powder. That ways you get the toasty flavor and an occasional nut in your cookie, but nothing that overpowers the chocolate in the cookie. A great trick which I am keeping!

I also did not have cake flour. I can never find it at the shops I generally visit. So, instead I used all-purpose flour with a little corn starch. (Substitution rule: for 2 cups cake flour, mix 1 3/4 cups all-purpose with 1/4 cup corn starch.)

But, in spite of all the substitutions, these cookies were just perfect- chewy, gooey, crunchy, caramelly- a bunch of flavors and textures packed together in one cookie! And the salt on top (at a loss of a better play of words), is like icing on a cake! Enjoy it slightly heated in the microwave (about 15 seconds) with a cold glass of milk, coffee or just by its own- it will always taste good!

New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookies

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