Five-Ingredient French Chocolate Cake
Stirred together with just five pantry staples, this French Chocolate Cake also goes by the name “Suzy’s Cake” in a nod to the driving inspiration behind the original recipe – Suzy Palatin, a cookbook author and good friend of the renowned pastry chef Pierre Hermé. To quote Hermé himself, this revelatory cake is “extraordinarily good and very simple to make”!
Ingredients
- 125 g dark chocolate, chopped.
- ½ cup unsalted butter (if using salted butter, simply omit adding salt separately)
- ⅓ cup caster sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 4 tbsp flour
- ½ tsp vanilla extract
- pinch of salt
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 180C. Butter a 6 inch cake pan, covering the bottom with parchment paper. Grease the paper and the sides of the pan with butter; set aside.
- Add the chocolate and butter to a heatproof mixing bowl and set this over a saucepan of barely simmering water, stirring until the chocolate and butter have melted evenly. Set aside.
- Beat the eggs and sugar together until the mixture is thick and creamy (pale yellow in colour). Whisk in the vanilla extract.
- Once the melted chocolate has cooled slightly, beat it into the eggs and sugar mixture until evenly combined and smooth.
- Gently fold in the flour (and salt) until no visible streaks remain. Don’t over-mix!
- Pour the batter into the prepped pan and smoothen the surface with a rubber spatula/ offset spatula. Bake at 180C for 25 – 30 minutes. The surface of the cake might crack whilst baking – this is normal! When checking for doneness, a toothpick plunged in the centre will emerge with a little moist batter attached.
- Let the cake pan cool down on a wire rack and come to room temperature before running a sharp knife around the edges of the cake pan and inverting the cake out onto your serving plate. Make sure the cake has completely cooled before serving, preferably with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or crème fraîche.
Notes
This recipe makes a 6 inch cake; double the recipe if you are using a 9 inch cake pan.