Life by Chocolate!

Posted on January 26, 2023 by Dr. Christine Grimaldi

“Life is too short, eat desserts first”

For this week’s recipe we have decided to create flourless chocolate cake because it tastes great and a lot of us have stomach issues.

We went to look up the history behind these flourless options and to our surprise it was not because of gluten allergies. This is what we found out about this kind of cake.

Flourless chocolate cake was invented in Ferrara, Italy. Over there this particular cake is called La Torta Tenderina. The name refers to the cake’s almost creamy interior which is enclosed in a fragile thin crust .

A flourless cake is a type of cake that does not use flour as an ingredient. Instead, the recipe includes alternatives such as ground nuts, almond meals, or puréed fruits to bind the ingredients together. Flourless cakes can be baked or unbaked depending on the recipe.

We decided to create two different options, one flourless cake by scratch and the other a pre-made box by Godiva. Both of the cakes took a similar time to bake, both have ganache toppings.

As investigators we researched what ganache meant and the history behind it.

Ganache is a popular, smooth and thick chocolate paste often used as a frosting on chocolate cake or a filling in chocolate truffles. The story about how it was created says that one day a French pastry master in Paris asked his assistant to melt chocolate and heat cream. The assistant did both and without direction combined the two ingredients. The master saw what had happened and he was infuriated yelling at his assistant that the mixture was a total “ganache” which was an insult back in the days. The insult is probably from the French word “Ganacher”, which means to slog, as if walking through mud or a mess. So in general, somehow the term was a colloquial way of insulting someone. But it also makes sense since ganache is dark chocolate and thick… visually speaking, sort of like yummy edible mud in some ways.

After the master tried the dark chocolate mistake, he decided to use it; the cakes filled with the chocolate mixture were always sold out. Every time they had to make more, the pastry master would say “hand me the ganache”. This is the legend about how this magnificent mixture was created.

Chocolate ganache glaze is a popular coating for chocolate cake. It first showed up around 1850. Without a doubt it is hard to know the true story of where the recipe was born because both France and Switzerland claim they are the creators of the original recipe. The famous book “Larousse Gastronomique” states that the chocolate recipe was created in Paris and so this is true to the original story.

There are many ways to use this silky chocolate paste, as well as several methods to make it depending on the application. The basic recipe is really easy to make, you just have to combine two parts of high quality chocolate and one part of cream.