French Chocolate Caaake!

Woo Hoo! Finally!

The whole baking process probably took about 2 hours, and then we had to give it a lot of time to cool because it is supposed to be served chilled.

Okay, so to start from the top I simply have to show you the ingredients.

Seriously, that's it! Eggs, butter, sugar, flour (One tablespoon!) Chocolate, and some orange liqueur for flavor.

So, to start off we need to prepare the spring-form (read: cheesecake) pan. The recipe says to generously grease the entire pan, and then line the bottom with a greased piece of parchment paper.

I didn't have any paper towels with which to apply Crisco, so I cheated and used PAM cooking spray [In retrospect I think this was a bad idea, you'll see with the final look of the cake below] Also, the parchment paper was a little smaller than the pan base, I don't know exactly why because I traced the inside of the wall when it was closed.

Anyway, that's taken care of, so now on to preparing the chocolate!

The recipe calls for NINE OUNCES of dark chocolate. That's two and a half of the 3.5oz/100g bars you can get at the grocery store. [I have no idea what we're going to do with the leftover chocolate...]

I swear the scale read 9.0 right before I took the picture.

So the chocolate needed to be melted along with the butter and sugar. Double-boiler FTW!

Look at that glorious, velvety, goopy mess.

Now, we turn to the eggs, which will make up the majority of the volume of the cake.

We need to beat the eggs for a minute to blend and slightly whip them.

Oh! I forgot to mention the last thing you need to do to the chocolate mixture once it cools a little bit.

This is when you add the Orange Liqueur. I used Marie Brizard's Parfait Amour, which is a French Orange Liqueur that I thought would be fitting.

Back to the eggs, and the bowl in which we'll be mixing the batter.

Once the eggs are beaten, you fold in the tablespoon of flour, and then pour in the chocolate mixture.

Beat everything together until it is well blended, and it looks like this.

Now we pour the batter into the spring-form pan.
You may notice that the spring-form pan is sitting in the lid of a turkey roasting pan; it is also covered in foil on the bottom. This is because we are going to pour boiling water into the roasting pan to help set the eggs in the batter while it bakes.
[You may also notice the image is a little blurry, that's because I forgot to turn off the automatic functions of the camera and make sure the flash was on]

So, now the boiling water is in the roasting pan.

Into the oven with ye! [And bake for 30 minutes]

When it comes out, it looks a lot like a cheesecake, however this will actually become the bottom of the cake.

As it cools, the cake will settle and shrink a bit, as you can see from it separating from the edge of the pan. This was about 20 minutes after we removed it from the oven.

All right, here is the cake flipped over and placed in a serving plate. [Here is why i think the Pam was a bad idea; see the wrinkles in the cake top? I think it was because the water content in the Pam soaked the parchment paper and warped it.]

We're not quite done yet, the cake needs to be decorated. To do this, we will make a negative-lattice pattern using powdered sugar and parchment paper strips.

And here's the final decorated cake. You can see the grooves set into the cake top by the wrinkled parchment paper. I don't think it will affect the taste at all, just the presentation.

I'll tell you how it tastes later tonight when we have it for dessert after dinner.