by Sydney Klein

Created on: February 24, 2010

The Best Flourless Chocolate Cake Recipe

For many years I made this cake exclusively on Passover as I didn’t feel the need for a flourless cake the rest of the year.  However, when my best friend found out she was a celiac and couldn’t eat gluten, I knew this was the perfect cake for her birthday.  Even though it is now possible to buy very good quality gluten free flour, which can be easily substituted for regular plain flour in most recipes, she, and I, still prefer this recipe as it makes a far lighter and moister cake.  I even made it for her and her new husband for the morning after their wedding!

This cake is also ideal if you are trying to cut down on wheat or carbohydrates.  100g of plain flour has 77g of carbohydrates compared with just 6.9g in the same quantity of ground almonds.  The almonds also provide 21g of protein, 55g of monounsaturated fat (this is the good stuff) as well as vitamin E, zinc, folic acid and calcium among others and absolutely no cholesterol.  This doesn’t mean that the goodness in the almonds cancels out the sugar and chocolate but this is probably the closest you can get to a “healthy” cake!

When baking I always recommend chopping up a bar of chocolate instead of using a bag of chocolate chips as the quality of the chocolate will be far superior - my preference is for Green & Blacks for all chocolate products.

Ingredients:

6 eggs

250g caster sugar

200g ground almonds

2tbsp vegetable oil

250g dark chocolate – at least 70% cocoa solids

1tsp gluten free baking powder

Method:

1 - Heat the oven to 200C/400F/gas mark 6

2 - Line a 26cm cake tin with baking paper.

3 - Put all the ingredients, except the chocolate, in a large bowl and mix together well.

4 - Melt 200g of the chocolate.

5 - Chop the remaining 50g of chocolate into small pieces.

6 - Add the melted and chopped chocolate to the rest of the cake mixture and stir well.

7 - Pour the cake mixture into the cake tin and bake for 40 minutes.

8 - When baked leave the cake in the tin to cool as it will still be very soft and gooey in the middle – this will set when the cake has cooled.

9 - Serve dusted with icing sugar with freshly whipped cream or vanilla ice-cream on the side.

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