It starts, of course, with chocolate. (I suppose a flourless cake could be made with cocoa, but call me dubious.) This recipe uses both bittersweet chocolate (I used Valrhona Caraïbe 66%) and unsweetened (I used Callebaut) — although, strangely enough, it then adds more sugar to the chocolate after it’s melted by mixing in a simple syrup. Before melting, the chocolate must be chopped up, and I find a cleaver works best for this.

I always re-weigh chocolate after chopping — there’s no telling how much you lose when little bits scatter across the counter, fall on the floor, etc. — and in this case I was a little short, and had to make it up with a different kind of chocolate (Callebaut 70-30-NV in broken bits from the Whole Foods cheese department).

I weighed the two chocolates in separate containers, although if I had read ahead in the recipe (which is a short one) I would have noticed that they are melted together in a double boiler, so I could have saved myself some cleanup.

The recipe headnote says that a 9- or 10-inch cake pan can be used, but the actual instructions specify a 10″ pan explicitly, and calls for it to be prepared “by greasing, lining with parchment and greasing again”. I used my usual technique of baking spray to stick the parchment to the pan and then baking spray again on top. I made a parchment collar (since the recipe calls for “lining” the pan and not just covering the bottom) by cutting two-inch strips of parchment using a straightedge and ruler. (Pre-cut parchment rounds are readily available for smaller cake pans, but I don’t bake cakes so frequently that I would have them ready to hand, and cutting a round from a square sheet of parchment is not that hard.)

As befits the theme ingredient of the episode this recipe came from, there is a lot of five-spice powder in the recipe. I measured it out and came up with 17 grams — more than half an ounce — which may save you a few seconds measuring if you should try to make this recipe yourself.

There’s also a lot of butter in this cake — a surprising amount, really, more than half a pound.

The two chocolates and the butter are melted together in a double boiler over simmering water. I don’t have room in my kitchen for a double boiler when a simple Pyrex bowl sitting atop a saucepan of water works just as well.

The chocolate-butter mixture is almost completely melted — you can still see a few chunks of unmelted butter. Once the butter is completely melted, a 1:1 simple syrup (made in a separate saucepan) is whisked into the mixture to sweeten it up.

The recipe calls for six extra-large eggs. Most recipes call for regular large eggs. The difference between the two sizes is fairly small, but since I had to buy eggs anyway, I bought a half-dozen extra-large eggs. These were clearly good quality and fresh, based on the appearance.

The eggs and more sugar are whipped together “until tripled in size” — I assume Tsai means “tripled in volume” here, since there’s no other plausible meaning. Whipping the eggs with sugar creates a foam that gives the cake its final texture, and also helps to protect the eggs from curdling when the still-hot chocolate-butter mixture is folded into it.

This is what the eggs look like after being beaten into a foam with the sugar. You can see that they are significantly lighter. (Actually, I didn’t process these photos for absolute colorimetry, but trust me on this: the eggs are quite a bit lighter in color.)

After folding in the chocolate, you get something that I guess can be called a “batter”, although it’s a bit of an odd one in that regard since it contains no starches at all — the entire structure, to the extent it has one, comes from the egg foam. (But it’s not a mousse, nor a custard, nor a soufflé, all of which are constructed differently.)

OK, here’s the “this is what it looks like before it goes in the oven” photo that I almost always forget to take. Note how high the batter comes up the edge — I might have had a bit of trouble fitting all that cake into a standard 9″x2″ cake pan, although a 9″x3″ springform would have been just fine (modulo adjustments in cooking time). The recipe calls for cooking this in a water bath — I had to buy a disposable aluminum roasting pan as this 10-inch cake pan is now the largest non-disposable pan I own!

And now it’s done and cooling on the rack. The recipe says 50–70 minutes at a very low 275°F; if I recall correctly, I gave it about 65 minutes.

The recipe also gives a somewhat unusual doneness test. Tsai says “check that batter clinging to the knife has a spongy, pudding-like consistency” — I think I got that here.

So I turned the cake out onto my biggest cutting board — what happened to the bottom there? Well, the creases are clearly transferred from the parchment lining the bottom of the pan — one of the selling points, I suppose, of those pre-cut parchment rounds — but the rest of it is a mistake on my part. You see, I ignored the advice of EVERY BAKER EVER and put the cake pan in the roasting pan before I poured in the hot water for the water bath — and of course some of it splashed over into the cake pan and somehow (luckily!) ended up underneath the parchment lining. Next time, I too will remember. Because it was still a pretty damn good cake and certainly good enough for there to be a next time. (And if the snow ever stops, I’ll bring some into work and share with my colleagues. Assuming I haven’t eaten the rest by then.)

To slice this cake really demands a clean, warm knife for every cut. I got twelve slices quite easily — the recipe doesn’t specify, but for a ten-inch pan that’s a pretty reasonably number. (A thicker cake baked in a nine-inch pan might be a challenge to get that many slices from, so I’m glad I splurged and bought the 10″ pan just for this recipe.) I could see a restaurant baking individual cakes in ramekins, probably 12 to 16 per recipe, which might be an easier option for home cooks as well — if you have that many ramekins to begin with.

PS: I’d include a link to the recipe on Tsai’s Web site, ming.com, but it doesn’t appear to be available any more. I’ve asked about it on Twitter; we’ll see if anything comes of that.

Nutrition

There’s actually (surprisingly) no salt in this recipe, so if I’m not mistaken it meets FDA guidelines as a “low-sodium food”.