Tuesday 24 May 2011

Chocolate Amaretti Torte


Every blogger with even the slightest inclination towards cakeal matters must have blogged about Dorie Greenspan’s Fifteen-Minute Magic Chocolate Amaretti Torte by now. I found it in Baking, but when googling to see how others went with it, it seemed that everyone in the world had made it and saw that it was good. I would like to add my voice to the chorus of torte celebration, if I may, now that I’ve made it at least five times. 

It’s elegant, dark, grown-up and rich, and you’d never know that the cake part really is put together in fifteen minutes, albeit with the help of a food processor. There’s a little more to it than that – such as the later preparation of the chocolate ganache and the almond cream, which is listed as optional but should be considered absolutely compulsory.

The only departures I take from Dorie’s recipe is that:

  • I toast the slivered almonds before they go in the food processor, as I often do with almonds; 
  • I add a splash of Amaretto to the ganache, and sometimes to the cream, although this time I used Pure Almond Extract from Sur la Table, yes I did, because it's a pungent revelation after a lifetime of Queen’s almond essence; 
  • I encircle the perimeter with the remaining whole amaretti biscuits* so that each slender cake slice has a high-domed, crunchy bit of delight on its widest end.

 *Unless there’s something else to be done with them; crushed up over icecream they’re fabulous, or over pumpkin and sage risotto. And in that case the torte has more toasted slivered almonds sprinkled around the edge instead, as it was in this case – as you can see in the appallingly bad photo that was all I had the opportunity to take before it was snaffled from under the very iPhone lens.

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