When we were little my mum used to make a date loaf. It was reliable rather than fun, but I still liked it, especially with butter and cheese. There were other cakes too, but the date loaf was “the cake” that was pretty much always in the kitchen. It was a bit like a teacake crossed with a malt loaf.
The date loaf was later toppled by the marmalade cake – a recipe from a neighbour called Frieda. The reason I remember this is because years later, in the throes of a romance with sticky-backed plastic and covering exercise books, I glued all my mum’s handwritten recipes on to squares of cereal packet cardboard, wrote the name of the person whose recipe it was at the top, then covered the whole thing in sticky-backed plastic. There was soft margarine and bitter orange marmalade in the marmalade cake batter, which meant it baked into a soft, sticky cake. As if it wasn’t sweet enough, it was finished with marmalade glaze, then swirled with icing. The best bits were the swirls, which could be picked off in big pieces, if you were lucky. My Dad is devoted to both marmalade and cake, so this cake always went down well with him. Then the marmalade cake was knocked off the cake podium by Rosie Mortimer’s chocolate brownies, tray after tray of which were made, cooled, iced and eaten. Those brownies were in our hands as we grew from kids charging round the kitchen and garden, into teens charging up the stairs.
Then Mum found her cake of cakes, Sophie Grigson’s Caprese. I can picture the book the recipe comes from: it is bright yellow and called Organic: A New Way of Eating. These days I think we might refer to it as a flourless chocolate cake and talk about what it doesn’t have (gluten), as opposed to what it has – a habit I find very odd. Back then it was Sophie’s (no surname needed) Caprese or simply “the cake”. Just almonds, chocolate, butter, sugar and eggs, it is dense and dark cake. For about 12 years, and even now, every celebration, party, birthday, picnic, get-together, would be accompanied by the cake – possibly two – large, dark rounds, dusted with enough icing sugar to make sure some of it ended up on your jumper.
I never felt any need to make the cake myself. Until I moved to Rome that is, and alongside lots of learning and re-learning in the kitchen, there were waves of nostalgia cooking, attempts to conjure up what I was missing, and this included Sophie’s Caprese. Which is, of course, Italian – Caprese coming from the island of Capri; not that my nostalgia was bothered about that. I made plenty of scones and pies, too. Rome was also the place that reignited my love of writing and reading about food: I have chased almond and chocolate cakes through books by Artusi, Ada Boni, Elizabeth David, Delia and lots of others. For a while my cake was a bit Sophie, a bit Elizabeth, with advice from Capri.
Now that cake has been toppled by my take on Anna Del Conte’s daughter Julia’s cake, a name-tag that makes me wish I was still making recipe cards and covering them with sticky-backed plastic. It is such a good cake, and straightforward too, which is how cakes need to be for me – something you can make without too much fuss.
Whether you use whole or ground almonds depends on whether you are using a food processor or not. I do it all by hand so I buy good ground almonds (always check the date), and then chop the chocolate into relatively small but rough bits that then melt as the cake bakes, so the final cake looks like a speckled beauty. It is a dense, moist cake, with fat crumbs, not overly sweet and intensely chocolatey. Much has been written the merits of baking with almonds and no butter, so I won’t bore you. For the last two cakes I have added orange zest, so the cake reminds me of Terry’s Chocolate Orange, which I like, but it does compete with the almonds a little. I will leave the orange decision up to you.
You can take this cake anywhere and it will fit in. Dust with icing sugar if the occasion is celebratory, dark cocoa if it is fancy. My partner Vincenzo tells me it is an ideal breakfast cake, but he is Sicilian and can eat cassata first thing in the morning. I like it at about 11 o’clock with a cup of tea, 4 o’clock with an espresso, or for pudding with cold cream.
Chocolate and almond cake
300g whole or ground almonds
200g dark chocolate
Zest of an unwaxed orange (optional)
200g caster sugar
A pinch of salt
5 tbsp whole milk
5 large eggs
1 Heat the oven to 180C/400F/gas mark 6. Generously butter and flour a 26cm cake tin, with a loose bottom if you like. If you want to roast the whole nuts, spread them on a baking sheet, and toast for 4–5 minutes, then rub with a cloth to get rid of the papery skin.
2 If you are using a food processor and whole almonds, pulse the nuts a few times, then add the roughly chopped chocolate and pulse until you have a coarse mixture.
3 If you are doing everything by hand, chop the chocolate finely with a sharp knife, grate over orange zest if you are using it, then mix with the ground almonds in a large bowl.
4 Add the sugar, salt and milk to the almond and chocolate and mix. Separate the eggs, setting the whites aside. Then beat the egg yolks into the mix one by one.
5 Whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks and then fold into the mixture, then scrape the mixture into the prepared tin. Bake for 40-50 minutes or until the cake is firm and just turning golden, and a skewer or piece of spaghetti inserted comes out clean. Allow to cool in the tin for a while before turning out.W
- Rachel Roddy is a food blogger based in Rome and the author of Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome (Saltyard, 2015) and winner of the 2015 André Simon food book award
