flourless chocolate hazelnut cake

There's quite a chasm between the sudden hankering for cake and baking one. A chasm consisting of finding a recipe, checking you have ingredients to hand, deciphering the recipe and summoning the motivation to tackle the various techniques and steps (my mum says that for her the most dreaded sentence in any recipe is ‘cream the butter and sugar’ to which she always answers “no. I will not be doing that” before slamming the cookbook shut.) Too often you might find yourself making do with nibbling on some cooking chocolate instead.

What if I told you that you could make a delicious cake without much bother? 15 minutes hands on at most. No creaming butter and sugar. A cake whose recipe is essentially distilled down to 2 steps. A cake that is so forgiving that if you undercook it, you're left with blissfully rich and gooey fondant in the centre of the cake. And if you overcook it, the middle stays miraculously decadent while the outside develops a delicious crunch.

Still on the fence? Look at my photo of the cake. See all those pretty hazelnuts and toffee shards? That's not because I'm fancy, it's because the entire middle of my cake collapsed 25 mins into baking, leaving a solid rim around the perimeter. My cake resembled a crater volcano. This could've been caused by several things. However, it was still delicious, and it didn't look or taste like a mistake at all!

In a nutshell it's this: separate egg whites and yolks. Mix the yolks with all the other ingredients, then whip the egg whites and fold it into the cake batter before baking for about 40 mins.

Try it. It will become a family favourite, I guarantee.

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