Flourless Layer Cake With Chocolate and Raspberries

For this year’s Passover meals, we were in Montreal, and I made two different desserts ahead of time while in Toronto. One was an old favourite based on a Claudia Roden recipe involving boiling a whole orange. But this time, I used a mix of navel orange, clementine, and frozen yuzu peel. For night two, I tried something new.

The recipe for this layer cake is from the New York Times. It doesn’t have flour or dairy, so satisfies many diets and this particular holiday.

The baked and cooled cake layers were very delicate and hard to remove from the parchment, as warned in the directions. I had to cut them to fit the large box that I purchased.

Making the filling was interesting: after melting chocolate in a sugar syrup, you whisk the saucepan over ice until it thickens somewhat. Mine didn’t firm to a pudding consistency and was still pourable. But I carefully spread it to the edges of the layers.

My favourite part were the sweet-tart raspberries. I tore them up and tried to press them flat inside the cake. I had my daughter place the remaining berries on the top.

Quite a bit more work than an orange-almond cake, but I think it was worth it. It’s very chocolatey, but not cloying, due to the bright raspberries.