The Best Flourless CHOCOLATE CAKE with Claire Saffitz | Dessert Person

can you hear it yeah okay good hey everyone i'm claire saffits welcome to my home kitchen today at a dessert person i have a recipe for a flourless chocolate wave cake and it is a really elegant but easy to put together recipe that fits a number of dietary restrictions it's dairy free gluten free it is really elegant but also easy to make and i'm going to show you how to put it together [Music] the name of this recipe is flourless chocolate wave cake and it's called that because this is a kind of cake that has egg whites beaten into it and it rises really tall and then starts to fall as it comes out of the oven that's intentional and then as it falls the top of it kind of ripples and makes this wavy edge that's really pretty and i think it looks really cool and so that's why i call it my flourless chocolate wave cake but i made that up because i like the way it looked [Music] the sort of heart of this recipe is that you have to make a meringue out of beaten egg white to fold into the chocolate mixture but it's two bowls one for melting the chocolate one for making the meringue so i have a stand mixer here and then i also have a set up called a double boiler which is that's hot a saucepan of very not even simmering water but just steaming hot water and then a heat proof bowl on top i also have a nine inch springform pan you could make it in a 10 inch pan it just won't rise quite as high ingredients so starting with chocolate i have 10 ounces i'm using like a semi-sweet chocolate between i like something between 64 and 72. half a cup of almond flour this is a blanched almond flour so you can see it doesn't have those brown specks from the skin of the almonds it doesn't matter what you use you could use another nut flour as well some granulated sugar neutral oil i'm using vegetable oil six large eggs a little vanilla extract and amaretto you could use rum you could use bourbon any kind of brown aged liquor works great the first step is to start melting my chocolate mixture i have a large bowl here i'm going to add my 10 ounces of chocolate this is a combination of i had like a little bit of these baking disks left and then i bought like the bar chocolate so i just broke it up into pieces now three tablespoons of amaretto in most cases like you can omit alcohol but it's almost like adding soy sauce to a recipe it's like this aged product that has a lot of complexity and a lot of flavor and also enhances the other flavors in the cake and i'm going to add a quarter cup of water i'm adding a half cup of neutral oil you could use olive oil there's no reason why you couldn't you just don't really taste it in the final cake so i don't see much of a point of using good olive oil you could use avocado oil grape seed so i'm going to put this over my saucepan i have maybe three quarters of an inch or even that of water in here you can see it's steaming you don't want this to be boiling you want it to be a gentle heat you basically when you melt chocolate you want to do so gently so i'm going to let this sit here while that's heating up and melting i will prepare our pan i use this for like the cheesecake episode and i'm going to just lightly oil it using some additional vegetable oil and a pastry brush so i oil the bottom and then the sides and when you're doing it go all the way up to the very top of the sides this cake because it's lightened with egg white the air warms and expands and the cake rises taller and higher than the sides of the cake which is why you want to grease it all the way to the very very top so that it doesn't get stuck and then like settle unevenly i know i've been talking about it in this season of dessert person but i'm obsessed with these silicone pan liners so so easy and nothing sticks to them i'll still go ahead and oil it a little bit i'm going to toss some sugar inside the pan and coat everything is there a name for those things on like a rock climbing wall that are like the grip things yeah they're called raw they're called rocks they're like grips the sugar acts as little grippy areas for the cake to climb onto and it helps it rise so if you've ever made like a souffle it just helps things to like rise higher and create traction [Music] when you're separating eggs even if the recipe calls for room temperature eggs it's a good idea to separate them while they're still cold because the yolk will hold together much more firmly and you are less at risk of puncturing the yolk and then possibly getting some in the whites and then you don't have egg whites that whip up as airy so i'm going to do oh i'm going to do whites in here sometimes i get confused and i put them in the wrong bowl there's all sorts of tricks for separating eggs i like to just do the back and forth in the shell the main thing you want to do is just avoid getting any yolk in the white because then you kind of have to start over it's better to have a little white in the yolk that won't hurt anything than any yolk in the white i'm going to put the whites go ahead and plug it plug it into your stamp mixer the sugar is going to be for the egg whites oh i forgot an ingredient you guys so salt that's one of them sorry add that to the list so now i have this melted smooth chocolate mixture so what i want to do now is add my yolks and then whisk that in vigorously now at this point you can see that the mixture is looking a little bit broken when i say broken it means that like the fat has separated out from the other solids it will come back together so the egg yolks are going to do their thing which is to emulsify all the ingredients so once those are worked in really thoroughly you can add the almond flour this is a half cup go ahead and whisk really thoroughly and whisk until you see the mixture come back together so it looks really smooth and glossy and thick like brownie batter but there is a graininess to it because of the little particles of ground almonds that's almond flour now that i have this beautiful chocolate mixture i can turn to the egg whites i have the whisk attachment on my stand mixer so i'm adding a teaspoon of salt so i'm going to start mixing this on low to just break up the whites once you've broken up the whites and they're a little more liquid you can increase the speed i'll go to like medium high when the mixture goes white and foamy that's when you can start incorporating your sugar you want to wait until that point otherwise you won't get a meringue that's as light and you'll see that the texture is going to really transform it's going to become dense and glossy you're not going to be able to see the air bubbles i increased the speed to high just for a few seconds after i added all the sugar now i want to check the texture because you do not want to over whip meringue i would say that's actually a pretty firm peak so look at how nice that looks so this is good i'm ready oh wait i gotta add the vanilla i forgot the vanilla sorry i add vanilla to the egg whites after i've beaten them and that is partly to protect against overbeating when you add a little bit of liquid like vanilla extract it will just help smooth out the egg whites so if you if you have over beaten them this will loosen them a little bit okay so that's all that needs so you don't have to be too gentle at this stage you're just trying to quickly work them together and incorporate them and the color is going to go from really intense dark brown to a lighter brown because of those egg whites you can see that the texture is already quite different you are trying to take what's on the bottom of the bowl and transfer it to the top so that's that kind of folding over motion so you're using preferably a large flexible spatula like this and it is a scraping motion against the side of the bowl and the bottom and then a flick of the wrist to turn it from the bottom over onto the top i'm going to add about half of the remaining meringue this is one of my favorite things to do in all of baking is to fold meringue into a chocolate cake batter because it's so pretty i love the streaks that it forms so folding is a gentle way of incorporating two things and i want to be gentle because the more you work beaten egg whites the more you'll deflate them and cause them to lose that airy texture truth be told i did overbeat this meringue a little bit you can see that edge that's what over beaten ring looks like certainly not the end of the world i've done it before so i'm going to pour my batter into my prepared pan now because i slightly overbeat the meringue you might see like a little patch of meringue going in see like that little piece that's like a piece of meringue that didn't incorporate see that but no big deal it's you're still gonna have a very light cake so i'm gonna scrape everything in as a final step i give the surface of the cake a very generous dusting of sugar that beautiful delicate wave that sits on top of the cake that happens because of the granulated sugar that i sprinkle over top so in the recipe it calls for a measured amount it's two tablespoons i'm kind of eyeballing it here but it should be enough to coat the surface visibly in the sugar i love the texture contrast that you get with having that on the surface that looks good this is going to go into the oven at 350 and it doesn't take that long to bake it goes about 35 minutes and i'll check it with a cake tester because i want a tester to come out clean the whole kitchen started to smell like chocolate so that's how i know it's getting close and i'm going to check it while it's still in the oven so i have my cake tester anyone wondering why i keep this here it's so i can do this and be ready it's just very handy it's like a little holding area these are just for testing things as they come out of the oven and it's just like i can easily pluck it and i always keep it right here front and center i'm going to just puncture through the top and my cake tester is not clean although it's closed so it'll be ready soon i'll show you what the cake tester looks like it doesn't have a lot of batter stuff to it but it's still a little wet so i would say another maybe three minutes and then i'll pull it out [Music] it looks so pretty i love how the sugar doesn't dissolve into the cake the lid stays flat and then everything else in the cake kind of has a wavy it waves and it doesn't immediately sink but as it cools it gradually falls and you hit a jet right now if i try to unmold it it's so delicate at this stage it's hot the egg hasn't set yet because it's still hot so if i were to unmold it it would come apart in the pan and fall just fall apart so we are going to let this cool completely in the pan that's very important and you can see it's already started to settle a little bit even though you can't like see it happening but i can see that the heights gone down a bit so here's the cool cake it doesn't have a ton of structure and you end up not getting a clean cut when it's hot because the cake is just fragile and very tender so this is obviously cooled there's a cakiness to it it has a crumb but it also maintains an airiness where when you bite it like you get texture you get the almond flour but there's also a kind of dissolving sensation plus when it comes to chocolate because i feel like so many chocolate desserts can be overpowering and i feel like i need a palette cleanser in between bites like i gotta you know take a bite take a sip of water or something this i think is not overpowering in that way because it's so light can you hear that it's like a like little air bubbles popping that's it's so moussey it's really good and it's also like not for how not sweet it is i don't think it's overpoweringly bitter either there's only a half cup of sugar in the entire cake plus what's on top and on the sides of the pan you can really taste the chocolate this is the kind of chocolate cake i want to eat not the super like dense fudgy i don't need all that i just want something that has lightness to it but also intensity part of the reason i designed this cake to be dairy free so it's perfect for passover so if you are someone who doesn't want a dairy dessert because you're having meat at your customer meal and so you're keeping things kosher this is the perfect cake because there's no flour and no dairy anyway i hope you try it it is like an evergreen chocolate cake really good for people on a gluten-free diet or on a no-dairy diet and i think you could serve it and no one would miss a thing thank you for watching dessert person and like and subscribe can looking at you guys

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 476,633

Keywords: flourless chocolate cake, chocolate cake recipe, flourless cake keto, flourless cake recipe, no flour cake, flourless desserts, flourless dessert recipes, dessert, chocolate cake, flourless cake, claire saffitz, dessert person, claire saffitz dessert person, flourless chocolate cake recipe, how to make flourless chocolate cake, how to make chocolate cake, gluten free, gluten free recipes, desserts, dessert recipes, dessert ideas, claire saffitz makes, bon appetit, cake, cakes

Id: 1fCZN27e9Bo

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I’m gonna have to retry this one with better chocolate than I used last time

[u/Karminah]

This cake is so good! Please use a high quality dark chocolate to make it. My friends couldn't believe how delicious it was.

[u/betterUseThisOne]

I was already planning to try it this weekend, now I really can't wait! I'm glad she mentioned using any dark liqueur - I've got a delicious rum at home I'm now excited to use instead of getting amaretto liqueur at the store.

[u/TheAprilLudgates]

I made this for my Dad’s birthday this year and it was a big hit. So tasty!