I never liked cakes too much, they are either too dry or soggy. And another aspect is the very “eggy” taste of the dough. But when I saw the inspiration for this walnut cake with chocolate I realized that it can be different. Very fluffy and nutty dough that you can fill in with whatever cream might seem appropriate. I chose chocolate this time, but I find it a bit heavy, however it was really delicious. I had my inspiration from this Romanian lady, who is an amazing cook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjPzxxNHtsw. She made a tall and rather big cake for my taste. So I decided to cut all the ingredients in half and make 4 layers instead of 6. The result was rather cute and did not interfere with my weight for too long.
Walnut cake with chocolate
Servings: 4-6 pieces
Time: 2 hours
Difficulty: medium
Ingredients
Dough
- 3 egg whites
- 1/5 tsp vinegar
- 1.5 yolks
- 70 g sugar
- 40 g flour
- 35 g grind walnut (30 additional broken walnuts will be needed for the decoration)
Cream
- 175 g chocolate with 45% cocoa
- 1.5 yolks
- 3 spoons of water
- 20 g sugar
- 175 g heavy cream
Directions
Dough
- Beat the egg whites with the vinegar. The vinegar will help fixing the foam. Add in half of the sugar and mix until the foam becomes rather stiff.
- Separately, mix the yolks with the rest of the sugar and 2-3 spoons of water, that will help the yolks to foam more.
- Pour the yolk mixture over the whites foam and mix carefully with circular movement until combined.
- With a strainer powder the flour bit by bit and mix carefully with circular movement until combined.
- Finally, add the walnuts all in one go and mix them in. I grinded the walnuts myself with the blender.
- On a baking sheet draw 4 equal circles, mine were with a simple Ikea bowl of 14 cm diameter.
- Add a bit of extra oil in the circles, to prevent the dough from sticking too hard on the paper.
- Pour in each circle an equal amount of dough.
- Bake the dough for 10 min in a preheated oven at 185 C.
- They will feel very sticky and undone, but this is how they should be. Wait a few min until removing them from the baking sheet, since they are sticky.
Cream
- Mix the egg yolks with the spoons of water and sugar until they are combined.
- Above a pot with boiling water place the egg mixture and mix continuously.
- When it becomes foamy and the sugar is diluted completely, add the chocolate chips. (Make sure the chocolate is not sweet, if it is, do not add all the sugar in the eggs).
- Mix well until the chocolate is melted and well combined.
- Remove from the vapors and add the rum essence (or can be rum alcohol) and mix until it becomes a soft cream. Add extra few spoons of cold water if you need to to mix better.
- Mix the heavy cream separately.
- Start combining the chocolate with the heavy cream by adding the heavy cream bit by bit and mixing with slow circular moves.
- All you need now is to assemble the cake: on one layer of dough add the chocolate cream and so on until the last layer.
- Cover the cake in cream and keep some extra for decorating. You can add walnuts on the edges of the cake and some strawberries on the top or any other decorations you have in mind.
- Keep in the fridge minimum 12 hours before serving. It is soft and absolutely delicious.
