Dahlia Bakery's Flourless Intense Chocolate Cake Recipe

Every holiday, one of the first things I do is to make a trip to a library and riff through their cookbook section. This usually ends with me lugging all sorts of cookbooks back home, where I peruse them at my own leisure, and pick out recipes that look interesting and do-able. (Sometimes, I leave Singapore in a hurry without returning the books. My dad was non-too-pleased about having to return them the last time around, especially since they weighed 4 kg.) 

One handy little tool when browsing in the library is to use the Amazon app. Amazon Flow is magic; point your phone's camera at a book, and Amazon instantly recognises it and directs you to their customer reviews.  

One cookbook I found this way is The Dahlia Bakery Cookbook: Sweetness in Seattle, written by Tom Douglas, a multi-award winning chef and restaurateur. Among other recipes, this Intense Chocolate Cake caught my eye. How often do you see a chocolate cake recipe that calls for milk chocolate? Me neither. Luckily, my amazing sister gifted me several slabs of Cailler milk chocolate from a year back, and I put them to good use.  

The texture of this cake is surprisingly crumbly: each forkful disintegrates in the mouth to form crumbs bursting with a deep intense chocolate-ness. The cake is rich, and adding a ladle-full of crème anglaise provides a delightful contrast to the heady chocolate-ness of every bite.  

If this sounds right for you, you can't go wrong with this recipe. If you're looking for a flourless chocolate cake that is just as intense, but has a texture that's as smooth as satin, David Lebovitz's Chocolate Orbit Cake fits that bill. (The latter also happens to be Miss XS's favourite flourless chocolate cake out of all the recipes I tried.) 

As with all the others from my collection of flourless chocolate cake genre, there is no flour in this recipe. 

Dahlia Bakery's Flourless Intense Chocolate Cake Recipe

Adapted from Dahlia Bakery Cookbook: Sweetness in Seattle, by Tom Douglas and Shelley Lance
Makes one 8-inch cake  

The authors recommend that you use the best chocolate you can get your hands on. I haven't seen much milk chocolate that is meant for baking, possibly because after adding a myriad of other baking ingredients, you'd want a darker chocolate to impart more taste. The only milk chocolate that I've found that is expressively made for baking was by Cailler, which contains 29% cacao. For this recipe, I used a combination of Valrhona Guanaja and Cailler chocolate, but you can use whichever chocolate you come across. For bitter-sweet chocolate, a cacao range of 35-64% is recommended. For milk chocolate, I would try and find one as close to 35% as possible... You can find more information at David Lebovitz's Chocolate FAQ). 

Because the recipe required the cake to stand for 4 hours after baking, I think it's something to be made in the late morning or early afternoon to be served after dinner. It's certainly almost too rich for tea-time... Almost. 

Ingredients
170g milk chocolate, chopped
170g semisweet chocolate, chopped
170g unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch dice, plus more to coat the pan

4 large eggs, pre-warmed in a bowl of hot tap water for 5 minutes. 
38g (3 tablespoon) sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt (Or 1/2 teaspoon table salt)

Steps
1) Place the butter in a large saucepan and melt over the lowest possible heat setting. When the butter is almost melted, add both chocolate, stirring constantly with a spatula. When combined, remove saucepan from heat. Allow the mixture to cool for about 20 minutes, until it is no longer warm to the touch. 
2) Preheat the oven to 205C (400F). Butter the sides of the 8" springform pan. If you suspect the springform pan is not water-tight, wrap the exterior with aluminium foil, letting the foil come up to the sides.
3) In another bowl, add the eggs, sugar, vanilla and salt. Using an electric whisk, whisk at high speed (about 5 minutes) until the mixture thickens and triples in volume. 
4) Add 1/3 of the egg mixture to the chocolate mixture, and fold together to lighten the chocolate. Then add the chocolate-egg mixture to the egg mixture. Fold until they combine. Transfer the mixture to the cake pan. 
5) Fill a larger baking dish with simmering water (a water-bath), and place the cake pan into the larger baking dish. (Careful you don't add so much water that it sloshes into the batter.) Choose a shallow baking dish if you can, just ensure that the water comes about half-way up the side of the cake pan.   
6) Bake at 205C for about 20 minutes, until the surface is matte and the centre is just-set. If the centre jiggles as you shake, it's not ready. Keep an eye on the cake to prevent over-baking. 
7) When the cake is done, remove the baking dish from the oven. Leave the cake pan submerged in the hot baking dish for about an hour. Then remove the cake pan from the baking dish, and let the cake pan stand undisturbed for another 3 hours. 
8) When ready to serve, slice straight down and drag the knife out instead of lifting the blade up. Bonus points if you use a knife dipped in a cup of hot water. 
9) Best eaten on the same day. Because the cake is so rich in chocolate, serve thin wedges of the cake alongside ice cream, crème fraîche, sweetened whipped cream or crème anglaise.

Note: 
For Step 1, you can use a double boiler if you prefer, but I never found it necessary if I melt the butter over the smallest flame possible, and then add the chocolate and stir continuously until the chocolate melts. A double boiler is certainly safer to prevent the chocolate from scorching, but I live a dangerous and exciting life. Ahem. 

The milk chocolate took a really long time to melt. There was a stubborn mass that refused to melt, long after the dark chocolate was already melded with the butter. Not sure why. I swopped the silicon spatula out for a wooden one, turned up the fire and mashed it until they eventually became one. This little snag doesn't seem to hurt the taste of the final product. Lesson: don't give up!

The original recipe calls for a cake pan, I used a springform pan to avoid the tricky unmolding bit, which I didn't trust myself to do.