Good morning! It is a breezy summer morning here on the farm, I was supposed to have a visitor so I have made a beautiful chocolate cake, but now sadly, she can’t come, so I thought perhaps you might like to share it with me instead.
Ingredients
100g sesame seeds plus 5g for sprinkling
120g almond meal
125ml water
150g mild olive oil (note that this is in grams, not millilitres, there is a difference)
200g dark chocolate (I used a Lindt 70% dark)
30g cocoa
5 eggs
250g caster sugar
3g (1 teaspoon) baking powder
15g tapioca starch
Preheat oven to 160 degrees C fan forced, or a little hotter if your oven is not fan forced, (170).
Toast the sesame seeds until lightly golden and then, while they are still warm, grind them to a clumpy blonde powder. Combine with the almond meal, baking powder and tapioca, set aside.
In a medium sized pot place the water, olive oil, dark chocolate and cocoa, stir over a low heat until the chocolate has melted, don’t worry if the mixture looks like it has curdled a bit, that will not affect the cake.
Now, you can either do this bit in an electric mixer or a big bowl with a balloon whisk, which is how I did mine, purely because the mixer bowl was busy having a hot date with the dishwasher. Put your eggs in the bowl with the caster sugar and then beat the living daylights out of it until it is pale and full of air.
This is as pale as mine get at the moment, the girls have been knicking the apricots off the trees so their yolks are an even more lurid orange than they normally are. Now, whisk in your chocolate mixture.
And now FOLD in your sesame/almond mix.
Pour into a lined springform cake tin (I only ever line the bottom of mine, then run a knife around the inside of the cake about ten minutes after it comes out of the oven, but you can line the sides too if you want to), sprinkle the top with the additional sesame seeds and pop it into the oven.
Flourless cakes can be tricky to cook, you don’t want to burn them but you really don’t want to undercook them. This one took one hour and fifteen minutes to cook all up, the first 50 minutes I let it play at the 160 degrees, then I went to have a look at it.
Looks cooked, doesn’t it? Felt cooked too on top, but I have been around too long to believe everything I see, so we put a skewer into the centre and....
This cake is telling fibs. See that gooey skewer? It is not cooked. Back into the oven. I checked it again at one hour, still gooey so I turned the heat down to 150 so as not to scorch the sesame seeds and let it cook for another fifteen minutes. Let’s have a look at it now.
This looks more promising, nice big crack across the centre, don’t worry about that, it will close up as it cools. Let’s stick our skewer back in.
That’s more like it! This cake is cooked. Let it cool for ten minutes in the tin, then run your knife around the inside edge to loosen it and remove the walls and then lift the cake using the baking paper onto a plate. I am supposed to say let it cool fully before cutting, but I could not wait that long. Perhaps your will power is stronger than mine. Anyway, thank you for your company, I hope you enjoy this cake. Xxm
Before you go I would like to have one of our quick nutrition chats about this cake. As you know, if you follow this blog, we have been concentrating on our dairy free calcium intake recently, and this cake is actually a bit of a Trojan Horse. The seasame seeds, almonds, eggs, tapioca, chocolate and cocoa all combine here to tip the calcium scales of this cake at over 1500 mg, so if we were to cut this cake into eight portions, one serve is going to give us almost 20% of our daily calcium recommended daily intake. Calcium never tasted so good!