Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Chocolate Torte

This is my first attempt at making a chocolate torte. For those giggling away right now, it's the edible kind. :]

The recipe is simple enough to follow except for the part on melting chocolate. Up till just now, I have a 100% failure rate of making melted chocolates. Somehow, it'll always end up with sugary crystal lumps. Totally gross with the oil ozzing out and forming a top layer during cooling...but it has not yet deterred me from snacking on my Ferraro Rocher.

For those who have not the slightest idea what a torte is, I found this explanation of "Torte" from Dictionary.com:

a rich cake, esp. one containing little or no flour, usually made with eggs and ground nuts or bread crumbs.


Chocolate Torte


Ingredients:

150g dark chocolate
only had 80g of dark chocolate slab so topped up with Hershey's semi sweet chocolate chips
100g butter, room temperature made do with just 80g of butter
3 egg yolks
3 egg whites
70g caster sugar
30g cake flour
15g cocoa powder
icing sugar for dusting didn't use this as it's already sweet

Method:
(1) Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease or line a round pan with baking paper.

(2) Separate egg whites from egg yolks when the eggs are still cold from the refrigerator. Bring the egg whites and egg yolks to room temperature.

(3) Sift together the cake flour and cocoa powder. Set aside.

(4) Melt dark chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Remove from heat and add in the butter. Mix well. I did it with a bowl over a pan of boiling water - faster this way. Once all the chocolate has melted, I turned off the heat and added the butter.

(5) Whisk the egg yolks with 35g of sugar till mixture becomes thick, creamy and custard-like.

(6) Add in melted chocolate-butter mixture and whisk till well mixed.

(7) Add in flour mixture and fold in gently with a spatula. Set aside.

(8) In a clean mixing bowl, add 1/3 of the 35g sugar. With the electric whisk, beat the egg whites till it becomes foamy. Add in half of the remaining sugar and whisk till soft peaks form. Add in remaining sugar and beat till stiff peaks form. In my opinion, there is no need to add the sugar in instalments. Once the egg white is fluffy, it should be alright to add in all the sugar at once and beat till stiff peaks form.

(9) Add egg white to egg yolk mixture in 3 additions. Fold in gently with a spatula, making sure all the egg whites are incorporated into the batter.

(10) Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan. Bake for 30 - 35 mins.

(11) Remove cake from oven, unmould and let it cool on a wire rack.


Verdict:
(+) An easy enough cake recipe to follow

(-) A bit sweet for my liking
(-) A bit dry. Would go well with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream or coffee!

(=) After baking, the outer cake crust was so crispy that when I tried to invert it for cooling on the rack, it cracked totally. However, the crust tasted just like the breakfast cereal - CoCo Crunch!
(=) Even with the semisweet chocolate chips, the torte already has a bitter-sweet taste!
(=) The torte has a rich chocolatery taste

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