I am currently on a quest. A quest to make a cake as close as possible to the amazing dessert I’ve had at Atlanta’s Après Diem, where they simply call it “flourless chocolate cake”. I’ve learned that they buy it from the Buckhead Bread company where it is sold under the name “Chocolate Decadence” (far more suitable a name). This cake is a dense cake, not overly sweet, not fluffy or spongy at all, yet not moist or chewy in the way that, say, a brownie is. I would have a hard time accurately describing the texture, but it is smooth and rich and utterly sinful.
And so I began my quest. I first made a cake from a “flourless chocolate cake” recipe I found through Google. I was skeptical because the recipe said that the cake would fall and resemble a pie, which totally doesn’t describe the cake I was going after, but in other respects it seemed ok and in the end, it’s all about what it tastes like and the mouth feel, and not what it looks like.
Well, that one was a total disappointment. It was basically a big, round brownie with a high crusty edge and a fallen, flat center. Recipe discarded.
Next I tried a recipe recommended to me by someone on a message board I frequent. This one wasn’t flourless, but the woman said the texture sounded similar to what I was after, so I gave it a shot. Now this cake was good, certainly. A fairly dense and rich chocolate cake, to be sure. But it was spongy like a regular cake (if not light and fluffy) and after one piece I decided it really didn’t stand on its own, either, and so I whipped up a ganache and poured it over the top of the cake. This was a great improvement, though putting ganache on a cake that has already had a slice cut out required some creativity with aluminum foil.
My quest continued. I found a recipe online (through a link on that same message board) which sounded perfect. The picture looked exactly right as well. The cake was called le bete noire —the black beast. It sounded exactly perfect. It was a dense flourless cake topped with a rich ganache and I just couldn’t wait to try it.
I followed the recipe exactly. I don’t mind saying that I’m a very good cook, and an even better baker. When I lived in Tucson the four-star restaurant “Charles” actually bought a few cakes from me to sell by the slice in their dining room—an original recipe of mine, no less. I say this to emphasis the fact that I’m not a bumbling oaf in the kitchen and that I can follow a recipe without royally screwing it up. I’ve virtually never had a dish “fail” though I’ve had a few that I decided I didn’t care for enough to make again, and I confess I’ve let an occasional tray of cookies burn because I was checking my email.
continued:
— 11:11:21 PM
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06/11/2007 01:08 AM Reply
Mmmm…. Chocolate….
07/01/2007 03:53 PM Reply
We had gotten a new oven and Wild Thing decided we should have a cake to celebrate. Among her many acomplishments she is a top notch cook and baker.
So the cake was duly created and baked. After the specified time, she checked the mixture. All watery and not a cake yet. Add 1/2 hour more to baking. Still watery. 45 minutes later the edges had solidified. Nuts, she thought. We took the cake out and eventually ate the edges. Icingless, of course.
It was a while later when she looked at the new oven that she discovered she had misread one of the dials.
It was the first time either of us had ever had a broiled cake.
Just a thought.