There are lots of reasons you might want to make a flourless cake. Perhaps you’ve got a gluten-free friend coming over for a cuppa or maybe you need to eliminate flour from your own diet.
Luckily, there are lots of different cakes you can bake without flour. The key lies in following a few simple rules. First, you need to rethink the type of cake you’re making. Flourless cakes aren’t light and fluffy like a classic sponge. They are richer, denser, and fudgier - the type of cake that can double up as dinner party dessert.
The rules for flour-free cake success
- Don’t try to substitute the flour for something else. Flourless cakes don’t contain any starchy ingredient to provide structure, so the texture will be quite different to a regular sponge.
- Flourless cakes focus on eggs (either whole or separated), sugar (or syrup), and some kind of fat (usually butter or cream).
- The way you combine these three key ingredient types will dictate what kind of cake you end up with.
Your go-to flourless chocolate cake recipe
This dense, fudge chocolate cake doesn’t use any flour or flour-substitute. It is rich and sweet but retains enough fluffy texture (from the eggs) to keep it in the “cake” category. You could serve it with tea or coffee, or as a dessert at the end of a dinner party.
Ingredients
- 250g dark chocolate (70% cocoa or more)
- 85g gluten-free cocoa powder
- 260g unsalted butter
- 8 eggs (separated)
- 100g soft light brown sugar
- 160g golden caster sugar
- ½ tsp salt
- 1 tsp orange juice
Prep time 20 minutes
Cooking time 50 minutes
Method
1) Preheat the oven to 160C/320F/gas mark 3. Grease and line a 23cm cake tin.
2) Break the chocolate into pieces and melt in a bain marie, being careful not to burn the chocolate. Once melted, add the orange juice and stir through. Set the mixture aside to cool.
3) Separate the eggs, setting aside the whites. Put the egg yolks and sugars in a food processor and whisk. Add in the cocoa powder and the salt, mixing them in slowly.
4) Whisk the egg whites in a large bowl until they form soft peaks.
5) Fold the melted chocolate into the egg yolk/sugar mixture. Add a 1/3 of the egg whites to loosen the mixture before carefully folding in the rest.
6) Spoon the batter into the tin and bake for 40-50 minutes until the cake is set on top.
7) Remove from the oven and let it cool in the tin. Once cooled, remove from the tin and transfer to a rack or a serving dish. Serve with something less sweet such as Greek yoghurt, Quark, or crème fraiche.
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