Italy's Naturally Gluten Free Chocolate Cake

Chocolate and hazelnut. It is my all-time favorite combination. It really is. And Amelia, you're going to make me a delicious torta. Torta? Torta. Just a fancy word for cake, right? Cake. Chocolate and hazelnut cake. Torta Gianduja. So what is Gianduja? It is, as we said, the combination of chocolate and hazelnut. Yep. It is a beautiful thing. I love that it's your favorite because it's also my favorite. Yay! Okay, so to get started, I'm going to get you to separate six eggs. Okay. Six eggs. And I've noticed there's no flour in this cake. No flour. This one's naturally gluten-free. So the flour component is ground up roasted hazelnuts. And hazelnuts, just as is, are delicious, but when you roast them... Yeah. It brings out all of the oils. It brings out the aroma. It just really levels up. Yeah. And how long would you roast them in the oven for? They don't take too long, sort of 10 to 15 minutes. You want to get that smell in the And just pull them out right before you think they're done so that they don't over-roast. Because they'll continue cooking. They'll continue cooking. You almost hear them sizzling when they come out of the oven. It's very fun. While you're working on that, I am going to melt together my butter and chocolate. Okay. So you're using some good quality dark chocolate for this. Yes. When you are making a cake or any dessert, really, with dark chocolate, you want it to be really high percentage cocoa. Even if you don't love eating it that bitter, you're adding sugar, you're adding hazelnuts, you really need some boldness to really support that cocoa flavour. Okay. And I mean, I guess you could do this in the microwave if you didn't want to do it in a pot. I'm definitely a microwave type of girl. Yeah. I think your recipe in the book... Says microwave. Yes. I almost never use a double boiler. Is that bad to say? Should I not admit that? More washing up. It's more washing up. Straight into the microwave. Yeah. 30 seconds. Give it a stir every 30 seconds so the chocolate doesn't burn, but it's just so convenient. Yeah. So while this is melting away, Jazzy, I'm going to get you to essentially make a meringue. So we've got some sugar. Slowly rain it into those egg whites while they're whipping on high speed. Okay. And you'll get a really nice, thick, glossy meringue. So the trick here is not to add all the sugar right now. It's just get it all foamy and fluffy and then slowly rain it in. Exactly. When you add all that sugar at once, it can be really hard to get it dissolved and you always end up with sugar crystals in your meringue. We don't want that. There we go. Beautiful. Meringue looks perfect. Nice stiff peaks. Over here is my butter and chocolate, which I've just let cool down a little bit. And now it's just sort of assembly. So in go our egg yolks. I'm going to give that a very quick whisk. You want to cool the chocolate a little bit because you don't want those egg yolks to scramble as soon as they hit it. And then this one's optional, but a little bit of frangelico. So if you want to leave it out, you absolutely can. You don't need to replace it with anything, but it's just going to add a beautiful flavour to this. Frangelico, it's a hazelnut liqueur. Hazelnut liqueur, yeah. And so into this, we're going to start adding our egg whites. So I'll get you to pop a couple of spoonfuls in here. And when you're folding egg whites into something, the best thing to use is actually a whisk. It's going to incorporate the egg whites more quickly, which means you're going to retain a lot more air. That looks so dreamy. It's like mousse. Jump into there. Yeah, it's like a chocolate mousse. I could just set this and eat it right now. Wow, incredible. All right, you can get the rest in. Beautiful. So once that is nicely mixed in, I'm just going to switch over to my spatula and we're just going to fold through our hazelnuts. Beautiful. And we've milled our hazelnuts ourselves just in a food processor after they've been roasted, blitzed a few times. If you want it to be finer, you can. But I like this texture that you've done. You want this chunky texture. It really adds a little bit of difference as you're eating it to get a nice little bite of hazelnuts. So that is perfect. All right, shall I do the honours? You shall. A lot of batter. Here we go. And we've just lined the base of a springform tin with some baking paper. That's right. Do you want me to scrape? Yes, please. It's a two-person job, this one. So it's not going to overflow at all? No, it's just going to rise up and then as it comes out, collapsing on itself, which is a little bit of fun. Fantastic. Into the oven it goes. So while our cake is baking, we're going to make a little hazelnut ganache to go on top. Why not? So cream goes in. It's a really, really simple one. Cream in our saucepan here and then again, some good quality dark chocolate. And we're just going to melt the two of those together and then into this goes some Nutella and a little bit of butter. The butter is going to make this glossy and beautiful. So rich. Looks good. I love the crust on that. See that nice crunchy crust that you get from whisking the egg whites and sugar together? So we can get it onto our serving plate here. Okay. It's got some still some good height to it, doesn't it? It does. And to think it's naturally gluten-free. It's fantastic. The wonders of eggs, right? It's no easy way to do this. That's why I'm letting you do it. Yep, I noticed. Go, peel that away. And then we just finish it with our ganache on top. You see that's set up really beautifully. That is pretty decadent. This is something I would request for my birthday. It's a real celebration cake, this one. And that did firm up quite quickly. It doesn't need to go in the fridge or anything like that. No, it tends to go a little bit hard in the fridge. So just leave it at room temperature while your cake cools down and it will be this perfect like spreading consistency. It's a work of art. Look at that. Shall we have a taste? We most definitely should. You can almost hear how moussey it is in there. It's like starts crispy and then foamy. Exactly. Wow. There you go. Look at that. Sensational. I'm going to give you the honours. Oh, my lady. Thank you. Look at that. It's the texture. That looks fantastic. I'm so excited for you to eat this. We bake a lot of cakes on this show. I must say, Millie Jackson, you take the cake here. Thank you. It's a goodie. That is the best cake ever. Birthday request. This one for sure. It's got your name all over it. Oh, and the name of the book. You had me at cake. Genius. Thank you. That is so good. Make that at home.