October 3, 2021 — American

Chocolate and Almond Amaretti Torte

  • 2 hours
  • 10 PEOPLE
  • medium

This is a recipe adapted from an American cookbook (see story below) and an Italian torte from Capri as adapted by River Cafe. The American book helpfully states in their intro that a torte uses ground nuts or biscuits instead of flour.

The American torte uses finely ground almonds and Amaretti biscuits and is quite cake-like, the Capri torte has no flour or biscuits and the nuts are ground quite coarse. This cake is a successful blend of the two, resulting in a very nutty chocolate torte that has a light cake-like structure and texture.

The ideal tool to chop the chocolate is a mini chopper or food processor.

A brilliant cake for a birthday!

We'd love to see a photo when you plate up, please share #WhatDadCooked

Share this yummy recipe with a friend on WhatsApp

Follow us on Instagram — @WhatDadCooked

We'd love to see a photo when you plate up, please share #WhatDadCooked

Share this yummy recipe with a friend on WhatsApp

Follow us on Instagram — @WhatDadCooked

What you need

150g flaked almonds

85g Amaretti biscuits (the dry type)

225 Dark chocolate (7%0-85%)

225 butter

105g caster sugar (180g + 25g)

1 tbs Amaretti liqueur

6 medium eggs separated

2 tbs cocoa powder

ADVERTISEMENT

Dad's Recipe Tales

Mrs WDC’s Amaretti Birthday Cakes

Years ago, my father sent me a cookbook from America: How Cooking Works Sylvia Rosenthal (1981). Dad was an engineer, so was clearly taken by the title and inscribed a note on the inside about why the ‘how’ part of the title made his book different. However, apart from a couple pieces at the front explaining techniques and methods, the remainder was formatted as a normal recipe-based cookbook.

At the time my cookery book collection was in its infancy and comprised just a few books, meanwhile, the internet was not even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, so there would not have been many chocolate cake recipes about. Perhaps for this reason it is understandable that the Amaretti torte recipe at the back of my dad’s book was hit upon.

Unfortunately, the ingredients were listed in American cups and ounces (happily without ‘sticks’ of butter). These days, with the internet, it is not difficult to convert. But back at the time, it proved quite a task. Definitive source for conversions were difficult to find. They needed to include conversions for cups of wet and dry ingredients and cups of heavy and light ingredients. Therefore, our simple cake recipe became a bit of a complex maths conundrum – rather fitting for a book about the science of cooking. The page on which the Amaretti Torte recipe appeared, is now covered with scribbled coloured-ink and pencilled matrices of equations, conversions, corrections, and crossings out.

Perhaps, the simple fact that it is an American recipe being followed in a UK household is why the resulting cakes have been so variable or hit-and-miss. The first efforts were brilliant, and the cake quickly became the favourite – and now default – birthday cake in our family. However, over the years the torte has randomly transmutated into  into all kinds of variants – wet, dry, sunken, over-risen, white without chocolate or dark and too rich with too much chocolate. Of course, guests always expressed their delight at yet another amazing cake (for indeed the cake is nothing if not resilient and is delicious however it turns out).

To be fair the recipe has a few challenges – namely, finely chopped chocolate. What they don’t say in the book is how to chop it – what they were duty bound to say was the impact of different methods of chopping chocolate. When grated, chocolate becomes highly statically charged – so highly charged that particles of charged chocolate will fly about to stick to anything with an attractive opposite charge – which interestingly, happens to be just about every object and surface in the kitchen. If you try to contain the flying particles, say, in a blender, you will find that the finely chopped chocolate on release from the jar, will fly about like a pestilent swarm of midges until finally settling on opposite charged surfaces.

The other key element in the recipe is beating eggs and sugar till ‘light and fluffy’. Eggs and sugar will be ‘light in fluffy’ in a matter of minutes – but the book says to beat for at least 10 minutes. I’m sure the scientist in Sylvia Rosenthal, is trying communicate something important – perhaps the sugar crystals become smaller and attach to air bubbles in a more robust manner – thereby stabilising the rise and texture of the cake.

I know my dad must have been pleased with his cookery book gift. And indeed, it may well have instilled in me an interest in the science of cooking – I’ve read Harold McGee’s classic On Food and Cooking from cover to cover. Perhaps his greatest gift however, would have been to provide a definitive metric conversion for the torte recipe and perhaps a scientific guide on how to make the cake the same every time.

How Dad Cooked It

  1. Preheat the oven to 150C, Gas 2
  2. Butter a 23cm spring form baking tin. Line the base with white parchment paper and butter the top of the paper.
  3. Heat the almond flakes in a dry pan. Toast them until they just start to colour (do not burn). Put on a plate and cool.
  4. Chop the chocolate very finely, either with a good cook’s knife or very carefully on a table with lots of clear space using a grater. Otherwise, a mini chopper of (small) food processor is ideal.
  5. Make crumbs of the Amaretti, either bash in a plastic bag with a rolling pin or blitz in a chopper/processor.
  6. When the almonds are cool chop half very finely, chop the remainder more coarsely.
  7. Beat the butter and 180g of the sugar together for a good 10 minutes.
  8. Beat the yolks into the butter and sugar one at a time and continue to beat untill light and fluffy.
  9. Add the Amaretti liqueur and cocoa and beat again until mixed. Then add the chopped chocolate and beat and finally the Amaretti biscuit crumbs. Beat on low speed until mixed well – it will be quite a stiff mixture.
  10. Beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until just at the stiff peak stage. Add the 25g caster sugar and continue to beat until the whites are stiff.
  11. Add a quarter of the whites to the torte mix and beat into loosen the mixture, then carefully fold the remaining whites in three stages until evenly mixed.
  12. Fold the mixture into the buttered tin and bake for 45 – 55 minutes. Test with a skewer. It is possible to bake until the skewer is dry – but I think this is overcooking the torte. So remove the cake before then – there may be chocolate on the skewer – but this should mainly be melted chocolate rather than cake mixture.
  13. Serve with double cream.
Latest Recipes
Cassoulet de Toulouse à la Pappa

A perfect winter warmer – Cassoulet!

The Laughing Cow Lightest Loaded Quesadilla

Try Dad’s loaded low-fat salsa quesadillas with The Laughing Cow Lightest x8 cheese.

Melanzane Parmigiana with Dolmio 7 Vegetables Sun Ripened Tomato & Basil Pasta Sauce

An excellent way to turn a popular Italian slow food standard into an easy and quicker family classic.



ADVERTISEMENT
© What Dad Cooked, 2024. Privacy Policy. Terms and Conditions. Twitter Instagram