Actually, the heading should be “The best flourless chocolate cake.”

Yes, it is flourless and as far as chocolate cakes go, this one is simply incomparable. The texture changes from light cheesecake to mousse as you sample from outside to in. Every bite is as good as the Callebaut chocolate that went in it.

Here’s the unbelievable part to it: only 290 calories and 17 grams of carbohydrates per 1/16th slice!

While 1/16th may not seem like much, this cake packs a wallop of dark chocolate that it is sure to leave even the most fervid chocoholic totally sated. An equivalent “regular” flour-based cake with ganache and buttercream will easily break 500 calories and carry an absurd carbohydrate gram count.

I once made a 1170-calorie per serving dessert which was fabulous, but this one is even better.

And even better news – it freezes well. There is no danger for dieters and carb-counters such as myself of slicing away at the cake portion by portion until the whole cake is consumed. I’ve stashed away the rest of this cake, and I am resolved they will only be thawed out for my once a week cheat/reward day.

The recipe is from Baking Illustrated and was developed by Alice Medrich.

Notes:

• I used 8 ounces of 60% chocolate and 8 ounces of milk chocolate.
• It is imperative that you use an instant-read thermometer to determine doneness. I’ve overbaked this cake a couple times in the past because I did not use an instant-read thermometer. Those were quite awful.
• Take it out when the centre is 140F. It will still be very soupy. Don’t fret – it will look just like the first picture after 12 hours in the fridge. According to Baking Illustrated, 140F is a key temperature because the cake will continue to cook after it is taken out of the oven, killing Salmonella.

(first in a series of three)

Two years ago I had a phone conversation that went like this:

“I’m so stressed out. I have a year to finish these prerequisites, work full-time on top of that, and THEN apply to medical school and wait for almost another year to see if I get in.”

“Have you tried doing something to keep your mind off this? Why don’t you take up rock-climbing or train for a marathon or start baking?”

So, I picked up a copy of Baking 911, a cookbook that remains as my first and true love. It is perfect for anyone who has ever baked puck-hard cookies or anyone who has ever uttered an expletive first thing after opening the oven door.

I really enjoyed baking, and as soon as my early efforts began to improve, I started this humble blog. Over the next few months, I discovered Daring Bakers which pushed me to new baking heights. I’ve made some wonderful friends there, as well as over at Tuesdays with Dorie. (See my Tuesdays with Dorie baked goods here). In fairly short order, the name of this blog “Occasional Baker” was no longer appropriate. One of the sardonic friends I keep jokingly asked, “How’s your blog, ‘The Obsessive Baker’?”

Eventually I got the good news that I had been waiting for from UBC Medicine. After the heady few months that followed, I realized that I had the time to either bake or blog, but not quite both. Also, my interest has now turned to fresh, local foods and I am now, once again, an occasional baker. Going back to that phone conversation two years ago, I have now signed up to train for a marathon (a 2-year plan).

Baking remains a great stress reliever for me, and I very much enjoy sharing with new classmates and friends. This will continue. However, the demands of maintaining a blog – the meager couple hours required to shoot pictures, post-process images, and write something useful (which was always my aim) – directly competes with study time, so I now feel that this baby should be put to bed.

In this first of my last three posts I look back at the past year, which I feel is my best:

French macarons

If that comment about being an obsessive baker needs to be justified, this would be its strongest case. French macarons are incredibly difficult to turn out perfectly – with the frilly feet and smooth domed top. After seven batches, I finally turned these out:

The moral to this: perfect baking is over-rated. Honestly, even the macarons that were cracked or feet-less tasted the same as these beauties. I have never made macarons since, and I am ever thankful that there is a French patisserie nearby.

Dark chocolate cake

Everyone needs a good chocolate cake once in a while, and this is hands-down the best because it is easy, fool-proof, and a guaranteed crowd pleaser. There is no recipe in my blog post but it is from The Cake Bible which you should own if you do not already. Also, the author demonstrates this recipe over at youtube.

French lemon cream and classic tarts

I am a bit of a lemon tart snob. Tell me that there is any bit of flour or cornstarch in the filling and I will turn away. (Well, I will take a large forkful of the “lemon tart” and then turn away). Lemon tarts ought to be made with baked lemon curd. It is best when served naked except perhaps for a dusting of sugar – no berries, no meringue, no creme chantilly on top. The star is the lemon, and the shortbread crust its sole supporting companion.

Imagine the best baked lemon curd tart you have ever had (picture on right). Now imagine it tasting even better and speaking fluent French (picture on left).

Lemon curd cake

Underneath the curd and buttercream is an exquisite find – the White Chocolate Whisper Cake from The Cake Bible.

Lemon bundt

This bundt cake is intensely lemony, thanks to the generous addition of minced, macerated lemon rind. I applied the two-stage mixing technique I learned from The Cake Bible, which simplifies the cake-making process so much.

Recently, I made this cake again and had problems getting it out of the bundt pan. I realized that I missed a crucial step: applying baker’s grease to the pan. I merely used a non-stick spray, which as I found out doesn’t always work. I have never had any problems with baker’s grease on the other hand, and I encourage anyone with a bundt pan to make up a batch – your bundt cakes will release with a golden crust each time.

Brioche raisin snails and sticky buns

I have always feared using yeast, but not after these incarnations of brioche, the most cake-like of breads.

Ricotta polenta cake

The recipe has two uncommon ingredients for cakes. Ricotta, which is the whey by-product of Romano cheese making, and polenta, the Italian name for cornmeal.

Bûche de Noël

Through two years of baking and blogging, I am thankful for all the friends I made and the new family traditions that I started. Of the latter, I am sure that I will be baking bûches de Noël year after year.

Up next on Occasional Baker

• I simply cannot close this blog without sharing with you the best tart crust ever: a shortbread crust that remains crisp yet fork-tender even after days in the fridge.
• Revisiting Martha’s Birthday Cake. An ambitious project from two years ago, which I will make again for Patrick’s birthday in mid-August. Will it be better this time around? Come and join me for this blog’s finale.

Thanks to all of you who have been reading my old blog entries. I appreciate the emails asking if I will still write or if I am alright.

I will be back – just have to survive some exams first.

Have a great Spring!

A few classmates from medical school and I had a potluck dinner last night as part of our Wellness Initiative group. Absolutely everything was fantastic.

For my share, I made clafoutis with white chocolate and wild blueberries. It is the same clafoutis I made a few weeks ago:

The original recipe is from New World Provence: Modern French Cooking for Friends and Family by Alessandra and Jean-Francis Quaglia. Like Vij’s: Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine, this cookbook is written by Vancouver restaurateurs and it has all our local critics raving.

I remember very well how incredible the clafoutis at Provence Marinaside and was delighted to see that the recipe has been published.

Writes the couple: “We once took it off the menu but soon customers begged us to bring it back!”

I was one of those customers. I remember telling the waiter very pointedly that it was a mistake that they had taken it off the menu. Actually, I told more than one waiter that since I repeatedly asked for this dessert (I used to live right above their restaurant so I was a regular).

I immediately tried the recipe as written but found that an 8-inch tart pan wasn’t quite enough to hold the rich clafoutis batter. Also, the original recipe uses a tart crust that was not blind-baked I found the lingering slight taste of raw flour unappealing.

Remembering how glorious the dessert could be, I decided to tweak the recipe. I originally posted it here and it has been a work in progress since. The latest incarnation follows below.

Clafoutis with white chocolate and wild blueberries
(updated March 11, 2008)
adapted from New World Provence: Modern French Cooking for Friends and Family by Alessandra and Jean-Francis Quaglia

For the pastry shell: Use Dorie Greenspan’s sweet tart dough or your own trusted tart shell recipe. Roll out the dough and place in an 8″ pie dish or an 11″ tart pan. Line with foil, and blind bake with pie weights for 20-25 minutes at 375 F. Remove the foil and weights. Return the shell into the oven and bake some more until the bottom of the shell begins to brown, about 5 minutes. Let the crust cool to room temperature.

For the filling: Chop 4 to 8 ounces white chocolate (white chocolate can be very sweet, so judge according to your taste) and set aside.

Whip until barely stiff 1 cup heavy cream, then set aside in the refrigerator.

Cream 2/3 cup of sugar and 7 tablespoons unsalted butter, then slowly add one egg. If the mixture curdles, whip at a higher speed. The mixture should be homogenous and airy.

Fold in 3/4 cup all-purpose flour (spoon lightly into cup then sweep). Fold whipped cream into the batter in three portions. You can be fairly heavy-handed with the first third because the batter is quite stiff, but be gentler with folding the last two thirds.

Scatter 2/3 of the chopped white chocolate onto the crust. Dollop and spread one third of the batter. Press in 1 1/2 cups wild blueberries and scatter the remaining white chocolate on top of the berries. Dollop and spread the last two thirds batter, leaving a free one-inch margin all around.

The batter will spread as it bakes. To avoid overflowing, there should be a bit more batter in the middle than around the margins.

Bake at 350 F for 50 to 65 minutes, or until the clafoutis is puffed, golden and still slightly jiggly at the centre two inches. This will set some more with the residual heat of the ceramic dish. Cool to room temperature. Run a thin spatula around the rim of the clafoutis; this will make serving easier and more neat.

Chill in the refrigerator for two hours or serve at room temperature.

A Tuesdays with Dorie event

Have you ever set out to make a dessert in the face of a time crunch?

If so, you must have – armed with some forethought – diligently prepared each component a few days in advance, making sure that these will keep in the refrigerator. And, if you’re like me, the one thing you probably didn’t anticipate are the other hungry fellows who live with you and raid the fridge in your absence.

That is the gist of why I only have the génoise for this week’s TWD event, the Berry Surprise Cake on pages 273 to 275 of Baking: From My Home to Yours.

Having baked a few génoise cakes in the past, I was not so much daunted at the thought of having my cake fall, which I have been told, foam cakes are apt to do. I personally think the fear mongering around foam cakes is unfounded.

I can imagine in the past when the foam batter was beaten by hand – continuously up to half an hour or more – that the génoise might have acquired its reputation as a capricious prima donna. Kitchen Aid stand mixers now make easy work of creating the foam batter.

There is a “secret” to getting it right: the warm sugar/whole egg mixture needs to be beaten to the point that a thick, billowing, rope (the oft-used term “ribbon” isn’t quite enough) falls from the whisk when lifted. This rope should coil over itself and dissolve very slowly back into the batter. Most cookbooks will direct letting the Kitchen Aid rip at medium to medium-high speed for 5 minutes; I find that it takes me about 8 minutes to reach this state. In any case, it is best to ignore the advised time and go with the appearance of the batter – this is almost never less than 5 minutes.

A common cause of consternation is folding. A génoise batter is nothing more than a large bubble held together by egg proteins that have become arranged in an orderly manner because of the energy it received from vigorous beating. Folding must be done gently, evenly and quickly on one hand so the bubble doesn’t burst, but also thoroughly so no unmixed flour remains. This description makes it seem harder than the task really is. Many professionals use quick and apparently strong (to a casual observer) strokes when folding. But because I am not a pro, I like to fold this way (if video is not visible, click on this link):

Without the filling, I wasn’t be able to assemble the Berry Surprise Cake. However, I dug out some leftover plain butter cream in the freezer to which I added some pureed preserved peaches and came up with this:

Thanks to Mary Ann of Meet Me in the Kitchen for choosing this recipe. Please visit the other blogs participating in Tuesdays with Dorie.

Notes

• A génoise is endlessly adaptable and is a remarkable contrast to butter cakes in terms of its composition. The right amount of soaking syrup is essential so that the génoise comes to life.
• Instead of making one 8-inch cake, I divided the batter between two 6-inch round pans. The baking time was about 25 minutes.
• A sturdy cake, it tolerates carving before it is soaked with syrup. Here is a sketch of how I was going to excavate the middle of the genoise to make room for the filling:

• Instead of just using clarified butter, use browned butter (beurre noisette). It gives the cake a deeper, richer, nuttier flavour.
• To add the clarified butter or beurre noisette: fold all of the flour into the foam in three portions then take a cup of the foam and mix it with the beurre noisette, and finally fold that mixture into the foam. The batter will deflate slightly.
• It is fascinating to watch a génoise bake. In the final stages of baking, the génoise batter is somewhat sunken in the middle and has the appearance of a buttercake that is ill-fated and bound to fall. Then, in the last few minutes, the middle catches up and domes slightly. The cake flattens perfectly when it is taken out, and all is well.