Milk Street: We were smitten with Claire Ptak’s chocolate, prune and whiskey cake, but when we got the recipe back to Milk Street we knew we needed to make adjustments. Most home bakers aren’t as skilled as Ptak, and we wanted a cake people would fall in love with on the first try – as we did when we tasted her version. Her cake is deliciously gooey at the center, and we wanted to keep that. A ratio of 3:1 chocolate to butter – as well as 8 ounces of chopped pitted prunes – got us the results we wanted. We tried a variety of chocolates and preferred bar chocolates with 60 to 70 percent cacao (especially the Ghirardelli and Guittard brands). Chocolate chips contain stabilizers that can change the cake’s texture; it’s best to avoid them. Ptak uses almond flour, not an uncommon ingredient in flourless chocolate cakes such as this, but certainly not a common ingredient in American homes. In an effort to streamline, we reworked the cake a bit to leave it out and found the results just as good. At first we questioned the need to whip the egg yolks and whites separately, but we discovered it made a big difference. Whipping the yolks helps maintain the emulsion of chocolate and butter; skipping that step produced an unpleasantly dense cake. And of course by now we understood the value of under-whipping the egg whites and just barely mixing them into the batter. Ptak originally made this cake with Armagnac, but later switched to whiskey. We couldn’t easily find the former, and the latter – while delicious once the cake was cooled – tasted harsh when the cake was warm (and this cake begs to be eaten warm). We found dark rum tasted delicious warm or cooled and better complemented the molasses.
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Preheat: 325° | Yield: 12 servings | |
Prep: 0:30 | Wait: 1:00 | Cook: 0:40 |