Flourless Chocolate Cake with Pistachio Topping

For Christmas this year, I went as handmade as possible for every gift. The only things that I bought were a farting animals coloring book and "How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety", because how could I pass up either of those!? Along with the homemade GIFT gifts, I also made everyone a cookie variety box. I started in late October, looking for recipes and test subjects--since the cookies had to be able to be made a little ahead of time and mailed across the country, I wanted to be sure they weren't the "only delicious for 10 minutes after they come out of the oven" variety. Enter: my wonderful Texas-dwelling friends, willing to volunteer to taste test a few cookies and let me know how they came out. Sara has some dietary restrictions, which is inspiring me to try recipes I might not have otherwise (especially as I run out of ingredients in my kitchen and am too lazy to go to the store to get more!).

So, the Flourless Chocolate Cake:

No longer living in the outskirts of a major city, my local grocery store doesn't have the wide assortment of ingredients that I had grown accustomed to (like arugula, or kale, or sometimes zucchini!). I'm assuming without looking (see previous note about being lazy) that we don't have a grand selection of gluten-free flour alternatives, so I decided to stick to simply skipping the flour instead of trying to replace it.

Recipe

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs

• 3 tablespoons butter

• 3 tablespoons vegetable shortening*

• 4 ounces semi sweet chocolate

• 3 ounces granulated sugar (approximately 3/8 cup)

• 1/4 cup cocoa powder

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 1 tablespoon + 1/2 teaspoon almond extract

• vegetable oil spray

• 1/4 cup chopped pistachios (optional)***

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350° F. Take a 4x4" pan** and line with tinfoil, then lightly coat sides and bottom with vegetable oil spray.

2. Place a medium sized glass bowl over a small saucepan with simmering water (not a full boil) and add butter, cocoa powder, vegetable shortening, granulated sugar, and chocolate to the bowl.

3. Stir with a rubber spatula until everything is melted and smooth, then remove the bowl from the hot water.

4. Add vanilla and 1 tablespoon of almond extract, stir until combined.

5. Add eggs one at a time, stirring until completely combined each time.

6. Pour mixture into your pan, then put in the oven for 20-30 minutes. My oven has a very variable temperature, so please keep an eye on your cook times. You want a toothpick to come out mostly clean from the center, with a few crumbs stuck, when it's done.

7. Set on a cooling rack for 30 mins to an hour, then refrigerate for at least 4 hours.

8. Once the cake has cooled, pop it out of the pan. You can either add the nuts now, or cut into bite sized pieces and add the nuts then. It's a sticky cake, I'd recommend a little oil on your knife to cut nice pieces, then I took a bowl of chopped pistachios and squished the cake in a little to coat the top.

Notes:

*I ran out of butter and subbed shortening for some here. You can use 6 tablespoons of butter if you'd prefer.

**I also don't own a 4x4 pan, so I made a tinfoil pan within my 8x8 and filled the empty space with "baking beans" (some dried beans I usually would use as pie weights but they live in a Tupperware to reuse for baking purposes and aren't going to be eaten by accident).

***You could probably use just about any chopped nut here. Almonds would compliment the existing almond flavor, pecans might be a bit too sweet. It's tasty without any nuts, too!

Making a 4x4 (ish) pan

It's not beautiful, but it works! I took a square of tinfoil and folded it to approximately 2" thick rectangle, then bent the corner and put that inside my pan. I took a half sheet of tinfoil and laid it across top-to-bottom, holding the top edge of the pan, coming down to the bottom, then going up my tinfoil edge and back down over the side. I did the same thing from left to right, then poured the beans in as added support for my edges.

Making the Cake

When you set up your "double boiler" and give the ingredients a first stir, they'll look sort of terrible. That's fine, it'll get tasty later.

Going into the oven! I ended up taking 32 minutes to fully bake, but my oven is definitely a little weird (read: awful) at holding a temperature. Toothpick test should be your guideline, not any particular set of minutes!