For the Love of Chocolate: Daring Bakers Challenge

I love me some chocolate, the darker the better when baking I'm deciding. So for the formalities that need to be taken care of: The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE's blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

I have been interested and in love with Flourless Chocolate cake since the first time I tried it about four years ago at a little dessert shop here is Orlando called the Dessert Lady. She has one that has almond/ amaretto flavoring in it that is to die for. I had been intimidated to try to make my own but I did eventually attempt one recipe that I really liked from All Recipes but I made one error when making it that I didn't let the chocolate cool enough before adding my eggs and ended up with a little bit of cooked egg in my mixture. It wasn't enough to throw out the whole thing, but I didn't share it either. Since then I have learned many things about baking and one of those would be to temper my eggs before putting them in a hot mixture. Just mixing in a little sugar with the eggs first should do the trick.

However, this recipe did not call for sugar. It had three simple ingredients, chocolate, butter and eggs. The instructions did include letting the chocolate cool a little before adding the eggs though. So, the eggs weren't my issue in making this recipe. Everything came together easily enough, although I always second guess myself about beating egg whites as to whether they are stiff enough. But I got the mixture all together without deflating my batter and got it in the oven fine. Then this is when my problem surfaced. I didn't have an instant read thermometer that was suggested to use in the recipe, so I tried going by the time indicated. Turns out it was a bit too long for my cake. I probably should have taken into account that I was using a darker pan. In any case I did get the cake out of the oven before it was totally burned. It did have some crispy edges. I was pretty disappointed in myself for letting them get burned at all since I had finally decided to use my Scharffen Berger chocolate for this recipe.

But enough crying...I still thought the cake tasted good and it really did well with the homemade ice cream that I made. The cake was a little crumbly from being dried out but I found that warming it in the microwave for about 10 seconds helped. As far as the ice cream goes, I stuck with vanilla and used the Philadelphia style ice cream recipe that we received. I know using eggs in ice cream can produce some very good results, but I'm still not completely comfortable using them. More for the extra fat and calories content more than safety issues. But I guess when you are eating this cake with ice cream we aren't really counting calories.

Overall, I loved having this challenge in order to try another flourless cake recipe and also another ice cream recipe. Thanks to Wendy and Dharm for hosting.