Caprese Chocolate and Almond Cake

Torta Caprese, Italy’s beloved flourless chocolate cake, from the island of Capri, is a super-rich, not overly sweet, intensely chocolatey cake.  Also, it’s a bit of a fave.  It turns up regularly dusted with icing sugar for family parties, and with cocoa for swankier occasions.  

It’s flourless-ness, is attributed to a mistake, an omission on the part of the baker, that turned into a signature move.  On more than one occasion, I’ve heard it said that the Caprese is “uno dei pasticci più fortunati della storia”,  one of history’s most fortunate mistakes.  And, while I’m totally onboard for celebrating the flour mistake, bringing the history of the world’s timeline into it does seem a little dramatic.  But then again, emotions and events are experienced by Italians as big.  They are high resolution experiences, all lived through a lens of intensity.  So, I guess it only follows that forgetting to add the flour, wasn’t just a mishap in the kitchen, but rather one of history’s most fortunate mistakes.  

But theatrics aside, Torta Caprese  does have an impressive origin story.  It was the 1920s on the island of Carpri.  A cook – in one version a woman, in another a male chef named Carmine Di Fiore – was preparing a cake for some gangsters and got so flustered that they forgot the flour.  I like the Carmine version because it offers a little more flare, detailing that the gangsters were American, and were in Capri to buy a shipment of spats for Al Capone.  Woooahh … now what recipe story has spats  in it – those dapper, typically white, button-up protective coverings for shoes??  But back to the mobsters …  apparently, they were in raptures over the chocolate cake that was crisp on the outside, and simultaneously soft and rich on the inside,  and they asked for the recipe.  Carmine sighed with relief and set about documenting what became the legendary Torta Caprese. 

The recipe for this cake is a simple one, of dark chocolate, sugar, eggs, vanilla, almonds, and butter.  Some recipes use the same quantity of chocolate, sugar, and almonds, but I prefer this tweaked version from long-time Rome resident Eileen Dunne Crescenzi.  Being flourless, the cake is naturally gluten free. At the same time, with no flour or baking powder, egg is the only raising agent– so when choosing the size of your tin, consider that it will only swell a little in the oven.   If you want thicker/higher top cake, stick to the suggested pan size or go even smaller.

Torta Caprese is as rich, and indulgent as it sounds.  Not words that I usually utter,  but, thin slices, with a simple of dusting of icing sugar, and at the very most, some lightly whipped unsweetened cream, is all you need.