Flourless Chocolate Cake

This Flourless Chocolate Cake is a dense, rich chocolate cake that’s perfect for Passover or any other special occasion. It’s also naturally gluten-free.

Happy end-of-Passover! Or, happy regular day to you non-Jews reading this. Passover, if you didn’t know, is an 8-day celebration of the story of Exodus, where the ancient Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt (thanks Hebrew school!). The tricky part is that through these eight days, we’re not supposed to eat “chametz”, which is anything that is leavened or fermented, like bread, cake, certain alcohols, ect. To say the least, for a baker, it’s a bit of a pain in the butt. However, last week we had our Passover seder coming up and I needed to make a delicious dessert that fulfilled the Passover requirements. I used this time to go flourless and do some experimenting. I immediately thought: flourless chocolate cake! It was perfect.

I found a recipe that looked good, bought the highest quality chocolate I could find (Scharffen Berger) and got cooking. The recipe was quite simple, and I have to say the most time consuming part was chopping up the 18 ounces of chocolate the recipe required. This cake is the definition of dense and rich, and even my chocolate hungry family barely made a dent in it. But whoaaaa boy, this stuff is good! I topped the cake with some strawberries and powdered sugar to try and cut some of the richness, but I could still only handle a few bites.

This dessert, although rich and dense, is super elegant and impressive-looking, so don’t hesitate to serve it to your gluten-tolerant, non-Passover celebrating friends…just make sure they love chocolate. Any dinner can handle a dose of chocolate, so make sure your friends are overdosing on this cake. They’ll thank you.

Note: Make sure you start this cake the night before you serve it, because it requires an overnight chilling.

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Flourless Chocolate Cake

Author Rachel Conners

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup water
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 18 1 ounce squares bittersweet chocolate (best quality you can afford)
• 1 cup unsalted butter room temperature
• 6 eggs room temperature
• 10 strawberries sliced (optional)
• Powdered sugar

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C). Line one 10 inch round cake pan (or springform pan) with parchment paper, grease, and set aside.
2. In a small saucepan over medium heat combine the water, salt and sugar. Stir until completely dissolved and set aside.
3. In the microwave or on top of a double boiler, melt the chocolate. Place melted chocolate in the bowl of an electric mixer.
4. Cut the butter into about 16 pieces and beat the butter into the chocolate, 1 piece at a time. Beat in the hot sugar-water. Slowly beat in the eggs, one at a time. The batter will resemble chocolate frosting.
5. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Have a pan larger than the cake pan ready, put the cake pan in the larger pan and fill the pan with boiling water halfway up the sides of the cake pan. (I do this by placing the two pans in the oven and then filling with water - I'm less likely to spill boiling water all over the place!)
6. Bake cake in the water bath at 300 degrees F (150 degrees C) for 45 minutes. The center will still look wet. Chill cake overnight in the pan. To unmold, dip the bottom of the cake pan in hot water for 10 seconds and invert onto a serving plate. If desired, decorate cake with strawberries. Right before serving, sieve the powdered sugar over the top of the cake.