salty and sweety

Passport & Plate - French souffle cake

Ingredients
250 g of dark chocolate
200 g of butter
6 eggs
140 g of sugar
a pinch of salt

Serving ingredients:

whipped cream
cherries dried on the sun, and their juice

 

How to prepare this recipe
The most practical thing to do first is to prepare a mold. For this quantity of mixture I used a mold 26 cm in diameter, but a few times I also baked only half of the mixture in a mold 20 cm in diameter. The thing to do next is to cut the parchment paper (circle shaped for the bottom of the mold and stripped for the sides), oil the mold a bit in order fot the paper to stick, otherwise it will turn around and fall when you would go putting the mixture in.
Before turning the oven on 160 °C put a pot full of water at the bottom of it, in order for the steam to make the mixture wet.
Now slowly and calmly get down to the preparation of the cake mixture.
Cut the chocolate into cubes, melt it on aerated water. Finally, when the chocolate is completely dissolved put the butter in and blend it together off the steam.
Divide the yolks from the glaires, add about three thirds of sugar and resume beating until the mixture becomes yellowish and loose.
Add a pinch of salt in the glaire, and when it begins to tighten add sugar and beat it more until it becomes "snowish".
Add the melted chocolate to the white egg mixture and mix it slowly with the "snow" you got from glaires.
Pour the mixture in the mold and put it in the preheated oven - bake for about an hour.
The cake will slowly grow during baking, but after you take it out it always lowers a bit.
Finally, after it's cooled enough take the cake out of the mold.
I like to serve it with whipped cream and cherries, but everyone's free to use their imagination at this point.

 

The story behind this recipe
My late grandmother was a great cook and she always liked to bake different kinds of cakes. While I was little I liked to watch her do it and with time I developed a sort of passion over cooking. That's how it all began, including my learning about different types of souffle cakes. She was always there to help me out and correct my work if I've done it wrong, but actually I had to do it all by myself. I had to feel the paste between my fingers, which was soft, supple and elastic at the same time so it could stretch without problems. That's how I got courage and started loving this hobby of mine even though there were always cultural (gender) prejudices involved around me cooking at an early age. Now I really like to cook different dishes, but I don't like washing them :)