TWD ~ 15 Minute Magic: Chocolate Amaretti Torte

Our TWD selection this week is brought to you by Holly of Phe/MOM/enon. It’s the 15 Minute Magic: Chocolate Amaretti Torte! The “15 minute magic” part really only applies if you have a food processor. If you are food processor-less, and as temporally challenged as I am then this may take you quite a bit longer. That being said, this was relatively easy to make.  

The first challenge I encountered when contemplating this torte was sourcing the Amaretti di Saronno cookies. I don’t remember how many stores I checked, but I couldn’t find any in my area. No big surprise there, but I was crossing my fingers and toes that I might get lucky…oh well. I did get lucky with some Scharffen Berger chocolate on ebay no less (SCORE!), but that story is for another time. Jennifer from Keep Passing the Open Windows was kind enough to supply everyone with a recipe for the cookies. Amanda from Amanda’s Cookin’ supplied the precise weight of cookies needed. This is what I love about the TWD group…everyone is uber helpful! I really need to get more involved!

Please forgive the slideshow, but I really loved the way this turned out. I couldn’t stop taking pictures. I know, I make myself sick.

If you search around you’ll see a plethora of amaretti cookie recipes. I have a feeling that mine didn’t come out quite right, but they worked for the torte at least. Out of the oven the cookies were great, but given a day or two, they turned into something you might want to use when building a house. Maybe they’re supposed to turn into rock after a day? Somehow I doubt any successful recipe is supposed to turn into a rock after a day, but denial can be a wonderful thing. Now these beauties done by Amanda look NOTHING like the ones I made. They look delicate and beautiful, while mine on the other hand are worthy of violence. But hey, the torte came out fine so who cares. Right?? The only thing I can remember doing differently (other than doing this in a blender rather than a food processor) is I rolled mine in sugar, rather than sprinkle it on.

If you decide  to make this, know that you will need 2.75 ounces of cookie for the recipe. For those of you who are decrying the measurement given by weight….get a scale! Seriously. If you’re passionate about baking, then get one. Once you have one, experiment with measuring out a cup of flour a couple of times and you’ll see how the “dip and sweep” method can really screw your recipe over.

One thing I wanted to note was how to tell the done-ness of the cake. Dorie says to bake it for 25 to 30 minutes. My oven seems to be a gremlin from hell and while a few things actually get overdone once in awhile (don’t ask me why, that’s the reason for calling it a gremlin), it almost always takes at least an extra third of the original time extra. In this particular case it took an extra 10 minutes. BUT, this is my freak oven, so when baking this in your, hopefully angelic, oven check the thing after 25. Dorie did add the caveat to the 25 to 30 minutes of, “or until a thin knife inserted into the center of the cake comes out almost clean.” I used a toothpick. This is when I took it out of the oven:

Dorie also mentioned that the cake, “will dome slightly and the top will look dry; it might even crack.”

What she doesn’t realize is that almost every cake I bake domes, and generally it’s more than slightly. Of course there’s the odd disaster as well, but we don’t really want to remember that. Let’s focus on the positives, and this time according to the directions my cake turned out as planned because after Dorie describes what normally is considered grounds for harakiri in cake-dom, she says, “don’t worry” and she was right. Woo-hoo!

Speaking of positives, this is my first successful enrobe-ment! I have never been able to cover anything with chocolate neatly. My experience has always ended as a partially covered item that I later try to patch up while the chocolate is hardening before my eyes, only to give up and go for that messy, spikey look. I believe I owe my current success to two things. One, I decided to make an extra half of the recipe. This extra half gave me a little more product to work with in that initial pouring stage. And two, Dorie provided a great recipe for the glaze. It poured beautifully and didn’t set up too fast so I could pour a little more where needed. So, if you haven’t had any success with pouring a chocolate glaze over your cakes in the past like I have, try Dorie’s recipe and making a little extra while you’re at it. One thing to note about the recipe – follow it. Go figure. I did not. That’s why I have those little air bubbles in the chocolate, not that it mattered for me in the final result, but if you were looking for the glistening chocolate lake effect then you definitely should follow the recipe exactly. See, I didn’t wait for that full minute after pouring the cream over the chocolate. I just started stirring away like a monkey on a drum. I ended up have some tiny chunks of chocolate that were refusing to melt. I decided to get out my whisk, which solved the bits of unmelted chocolate issue, but introduced a chocolate bubble conundrum. A more patient person would have thought to give the glaze a rest for a few minutes to work the bubbles out itself, but….I guess I’m not a very patient person. Hence the bubbles.

I didn’t get the idea of decorating the top of the cake the way I did from Dorie. While she does recommend sprinkling the top of a slice with crushed amaretti or toasted almonds, she doesn’t mention anything as time consuming as what I decided to do. I actually got the idea from another cookbook, Pure Chocolate by Fran Bigelow. She has a recipe for a bitter almond chocolate tart (that I’ve never made) that’s decorated much more beautifully than my torte. She must have some kind of special sliced almond hunting squirrel’s like Willy Wonka because I had trouble find enough “pretty” slices to cover my torte. Even with some defective almond slices I still think it’s one of the prettiest things I’ve ever made.

You will want to make some kind of creamy accoutrement for this dessert. It is rich as hell and you will want some kind of milk product to chase the chocolate with. I chose a improv-ed vanilla whipped cream. I took a cup of heavy cream and added a couple of tablespoons of homemade vanilla syrup. There’s probably a better, more professional way to make vanilla whipped cream, all bespeckled with vanilla seeds but I was in a rush and the syrup was handy. If you don’t want to go to all that trouble, then a nice vanilla ice cream would work.

So to sum up, this will satisfy the chocolate freak in your family, but make sure you supply the milky chaser or they will feel like they entered that milk commercial with the guy in Hell.

Tagged as: Almond, Chocolate, TWD