Torta Caprese (Chocolate Almond Cake)

Torta caprese – chocolate, almonds, rum, vanilla… are you drooling yet?

 

 

I’ll wipe the drool off my keyboard and keep typing.

How it all began

My wife is a huge fan of desserts, I secretly am too.  Probably not a secret.  A few years ago a close friend was dating a girl who had a lot of allergies.  She and my wife became close friends really quickly, so we had them over for dinner.  One of her worst allergies was gluten.  So I was tasked with a gluten-free dessert that was delicious.  Honestly, that is not always an easy task.

 

I decided on a flourless chocolate cake.  Using almond flour as a replacement for the substance of flour and flavoring with some of my own vanilla (rum-based).  Then I found out that this cake had a name.  It is called Torta Caprese.  It comes from the Isle of Capri in  Italy and is an almond and chocolate cake that typically is flavored with some kind of liqueur.

The Story Continues…

So back to the friend and his girlfriend.  They broke up, and my wife told him ” Don’t bring any more girls around until you are gonna marry them because I’m tired of becoming friends with girls that I won’t get to see again.”  Or so we thought.

 

About six months later we saw her at church in our little community (she lived like 30 min away).  She had married our new neighbor’s son and now comes up and sees my wife all the time.  They are still really close friends.  I like to think it’s because of the Torta Caprese.

 

Maybe if you make it for a new friend you can develop a lifelong friendship, that’s what good food does.

Sciency Stuff

So here is the nerd section, if you are looking to get your chocolate fix quick skip on to the recipe, otherwise, fasten your seat belt I’m about to hit you with some science.

 

In traditional cakes (bread, biscuits, etc.) wheat flour serves one main purpose.  That is to create a structure that will incorporate air and allow the cake to feel fluffier and not so dense.  This is usually accomplished using some sort of leavening agent (yeast, baking soda, baking powder, or even steam sometimes).  The byproduct of the leavening agents is typically carbon dioxide, which is released as a gas into the glutenous structure.  The structure catches the carbon dioxide in small pockets that are surrounded by the gluten proteins that have been interlinked in the batter preparation.  That structure and carbon dioxide is what makes cake fluffy.  Other ingredients can and are added to mess with the structure and reaction.  Moral of the story is gluten (wheat flour) and baking powder make cakes not feel like a brick.

 

There-in lies the problem with flourless cakes.  How can you have a light cake without flour?  In comes the savior in this circumstance, egg whites.  You see the egg whites in and of themselves would do very little to lighten your gluten-free chocolate rock, but when we cheat and incorporate air into them they serve the same purpose as the gluten  & gas duo does in the traditional cake.  Egg white proteins (mainly ovalbumin) when beaten begin to interlink and create pockets where air from the constant beating becomes trapped.  The more you beat the stronger the linkings and the fuller the pockets (up to a point you can ultimately break the entire structure)that’s why you can have soft peaks, firm peaks and even shiny peaks with egg whites.

 

When this protein and air composition is incorporated into a flourless cake it lightens the entire cake by increasing the air to cake ratio in a serving.  The reason we fold beaten egg whites in is simply to protect the structure and not collapse it before we can enjoy it.

 

There you go, nerd stuff done, now on to the post.

 

This cake creates a beautiful crust with a sublimely moist center.  It is definitely a favorite in my household.  Every crumb is cleaned up every time.

 

Recipe