patrícia furtado

My friend Cláudia’s was 30 on Friday - Happy B’day C! - and I promised her a proper birthday cake for the dinner party.

She loves chocolate mousse, so I thought of creating a mousse-brownie sandwich sort of cake. But some of my recent experiments haven’t been very lucky, and I didn’t have the time to try again if this cake didn’t turn out just right. So I turned to one of my favourite food blogs - Smitten Kitchen - for something tried and tested, and found this recipe for a Double Chocolate Torte that seemed just perfect.

I adapted the quantities a little bit, removed the vanilla extract as I didn’t have any, and instead of using fresh raspberries I decided to decorate with chocolate shavings, following instructions I saw on a cook book. As it turns out, it’s not that easy to get nice big chocolate spirals, but I ended up with enough for what I had in mind.

In the end, everybody seemed to like it. The hard-core chocoholics, like the birthday girl, certainly did love it. But for me, it was a bit too rich and chocolaty, specially after the heavy meal we’d just had. It would have gone well with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side, to tone it down.

Double Chocolate Cake for Cláudia

Decoration
100ml whipping cream
1 tbsp sugar
100g dark chocolate

Preheat oven to 200ºC. Butter a 25cm diameter springform pan and dust with sugar.
In a heavy large saucepan over low heat, melt chocolate and butter, always stirring. Remove from heat, and whisk in sugar and then the eggs, one at a time. Finally, mix in the salt and the flour.

Bake for about 35 minutes. Cool completely before chilling, and do not remove from the pan.

For the mousse, melt the butter in bain-marie. Whisk egg yolks and half of the cream in small bowl to blend and then whisk this mixture into the melted butter. Keep whisking over simmering water for about 6 minutes and then add the chocolate and mix until it melts. Mixture may appear broken.

In large bowl, beat the egg whites and the sugar to medium-stiff peaks. First, add a bit of the egg whites into the warm chocolate mixture. Then, fold in remaining egg white mixture, until smooth, but without beating too much. Pour mousse over cake in pan and chill until mousse is set.

For the shavings, you need to warm the chocolate a bit in your hands, and use a vegetable peeler to create the little curls. You’ll get your hands dirty, but if the chocolate isn’t warm enough, it will break into small bits. Chill the shavings in the freezer while you whip the remaining cream with a spoon of sugar.

Remove the cake from the pan, by loosening it with a sharp knife around the edge, and place it on a serving dish. Spread the whipped cream over the top, and decorate with the chocolate shavings.