My sister bought some 120 g of ground almond because she thought that she would use it to bake almond cookies.
She didn’t. She baked other cookies but almond ones.
Since I would hate it to go to waste, I did some research and found out that some cake recipes just substitute ground almond for flour.
Great!
So I thought I should give it a try.
This is the celebrated short life of the Flour-less Chocolate-Almond Cake.
I didn’t follow the recipe religiously. It served as a guideline.
I had to thaw the butter because I put it in the freezer all night 🙂 I needed only half of the bar.
As you can see, there weren’t many ingredients.
1) 100 g salted butter, some 10 g for greasing.
2) 4 eggs – separated
3) ¾ cup of soft brown sugar
4) 250 g dark chocolate (the recipes demanded at last 70% of cocoa but I used 55%)
5) 1½ cup of ground almond (I used 1 cup of ground almond and ½ cup of ground hazelnut. I did not regret the decision)
METHOD
1) Grease the tin and preheat the oven to 180 C
2) Separate the 4 eggs.
I am not an Egg Separator Professional. I broke the egg, place it on the palm of my hands and let the egg yolk wriggles between my fingers. The egg white will slide in between into the clean bowl placed below.
3) I whisked the egg yolks and brown sugar until fluffy and quite pale in colour.
And in another clean bowl, you have the egg whites:
4) Whisk the egg whites until stiff. Use a machine. I spent an hour to get the desired consistency and gained about 100 g of bicep muscles.
5) Later did I melt the dark chocolate with salted butter (in a double boiler) or just place a chocolate filled metal bowl/pot/container on top of a steaming pot with boiling water. Whisk it until it’s all melted and had a liquid smooth consistency. The original recipe asked for the melting process to be done first but I knew the eggs would take some time so I reversed it.
Note: Just make sure the water didn’t touch the bowl or the chocolate will be bitter.
6) The delicate part: Pour the melted chocolate into the bowl with the egg yolks and sugar and combine thoroughly. Mix in the ground almonds (*and ground hazelnut) then immediately fold in the egg whites gently, using a metal spoon.
7) Pour the cake mixture into the tin and bake for 25-30 minutes. Mine was set for 27 minutes. Check with a toothpick or a fork. Prick the center and if it comes out clean it’s ready.
8) Remove the cake from the oven and leave it to rest for 10 minutes before unmoulding.
I did not even consider for a topping because that would proved to be too much. The cake is already rich, crispy in the outside, very nutty, chocolatey and creamier than most moist chocolate cakes.
The chef suggested clotted cream for serving and I looked for a homemade recipe. But calculating the timeline, I decided not to do it (8 hours in the oven? The cake would find it’s way to the sewage lines already) so we resolved to have it with vanilla ice-cream topped with chocolate lava sauce.
The result was paradise swirling inside of your mouth.
I had about 3 slices. The boys had about 6 per person.
At 9 PM (8 hours of cake life), it was all officially gone. This was the breaking record. Of all the chocolate cakes I baked (all with different recipes, ranging from 1.5 kg-2.0 kg) my brothers took about 2-7 days to consume it.
This one is a masterpiece.
Try it 🙂
[bisa] 
Dear B,
The cake looks so tasty. I’ll ask my mom to bake one for me 🙂
If you like chocolate, you’ll just love, love, love the cake. Switch to milk chocolate if you don’t like dark chocolate. A bit bitter, if you ask me.