Torta Caprese

For the recent Passover holiday, I came up with a few new ideas, like pavlova (giant baked meringue, with fresh fruit and cream), or thumbprint nut cookies for my family. But, predictably, they requested a flourless chocolate cake. Sigh, chocolate always wins.

Looking through my past Passover experiments, I can see many variations of chocolate nut cakes. But this time around, I used a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated (Nov 2018) for something called torta caprese. It’s an Italian chocolate cake made with ground almonds.

I took out the bag of ground almonds from the freezer, to take the chill off of them. My son helped me scale and melt the butter and chocolate, as well as whip the egg whites and yolks. The batter was quite thick, thicker than I would have expected for something lightened with stiffly beaten whites.

The baked cake turned out quite nicely, but didn’t look as high as the one in the magazine. Maybe I deflated the mixture too much. But in the mouth, it wasn’t dense at all. It was hard to describe: it yielded easily, but wasn’t fluffy. We didn’t make any additional desserts for the week, so this was a wonderful treat for a few nights in a row.