passover week 2025 - Flour and Stone siren chocolate cake

passover week 2025 - Flour and Stone siren chocolate cake

7 Apr 2025

Welcome to the first bake for Passover Week 2025 and it's a cracker. 6 months ago I ordered a copy of Nadine Ingram's new book Love Crumbs from the library. In February the book finally arrived and I perused it from cover to cover, bookmarking recipes I'd like to make. Each year I like to make a flourless chocolate cake for Passover and as soon as I saw Nadine's recipe for her Siren chocolate cake, I knew I'd found my cake for Passover week 2025.

Like most of Nadine's recipes, making this cake involves many steps but her recipes are very detailed and if you follow her instructions, you should be fine. Most of the recipes in Love Crumbs give quantities for a 20cm and a 25cm cake so I needed to do some tweaking so I could make a 17cm cake.

During passover you don't have too many chocolate choices. I did not use the Valrohna chocolate suggested as at $171/kilo it was a little out of my price range, so I used a combination of 70% chocolate, 45% chocolate and some milk chocolate and the cake was still deeply, darkly chocolate in taste. 

The cake is not meant to be made in a springform tin because it's baked in a water bath however almost all my tins are springform, so I double wrapped the base of the tin in foil and tied it with string. It seemed to do the trick. Also, a note about oven temperatures. The book doesn't mention whether the temperatures are for a fan-forced or a conventional oven. I have made quite a few of Nadine's recipes in the past and I always add 20°C to her suggested temperatures, as they are too low for my oven.

Here's the recipe for you which makes a 17cm cake. Please note the recipe link gives quantities for the 20cm and 25cm cakes. For all my recipes I use a 250ml cup and a 20 ml tablespoon, unsalted butter and 60g eggs. My oven is a conventional gas oven so if your oven is fan forced you may need to reduce the oven temperature by 20°C.

Flourless sour cherry and chocolate cake

Ingredients

120g Valrhona Manjari chocolate (minimum 64 per cent cocoa solids), plus extra 50g

40g Valrhona Jivara chocolate (minimum 40 per cent cocoa solids)

50g unsalted butter
80g whole almonds, skin on and toasted
4 eggs, separated
85g caster sugar
20g good-quality cocoa powder
pinch salt

1/4 tsp sea salt flakes, plus extra to serve
100g frozen sour cherries

clotted or thick cream, to serve (optional)

Method
1 Preheat the oven to 160°C, conventional. Line a 17 cm round cake tin with baking paper using the following instruction. This cake will be baked in a water bath, so you need to use a conventional tin, not a springform tin, to ensure it doesn't leak. On this occasion, you won't be tipping the cake upside down to get it out, instead you will be levering it out with the aid of two paper strips lining the base of the tin. So before you line the tin, lay a couple of long baking paper strips approximately 5 cm-wide and 40 cm-long crossing over one another so they meet in the centre of the tin, then run the strips up the sides and over the vim. Now line the tin as you usually do and do and set it aside. 

2 Half-fill a deep tray large enough to fit your cake tin with water and place it in the preheating oven.

3 Combine the 120g Manjari chocolate, all the Jivara chocolate, and the butter in a large (sounds excessive but bear with me) heatproof bowl and place over a saucepan of barely simmering water, making sure the bowl isn't touching the water, to half melt. Once half-melted, turn the heat off, and leave the bowel on top of the saucepan.

4 Meanwhile, place the extra 50g Manjari chocolate in a food processor and blitz to a fine crumb using the pulse function or pausing intermittently between 4 second spurts. This method allows the chocolate to fall from the sides of the processor back into the bowl and will ultimately form a fine, even crumb it the chocolate into a bowl without the chocolate overheating or melting. Decant the chocolate into a bowl, then add the toasted almonds to the food processor and blitz using the same method until they are just roughly chopped. Remove 25g of the coarsest almonds to use for the top of the cake and continue to blitz the remaining almonds until they form fine crumbs, then add these to the bowl with the Manjari crumb.

5 Place the egg yolks in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment and whisk on medium speed, then add half the caster sugar, increase the speed to high and beat until very pale and tripled in volume. Remove the bowl of chocolate from the saucepan and stir it to thoroughly combine the chocolate and butter, then, half at a time, gently fold through the whipped yolks with a spatula. Sift the cocoa directly over the chocolate mixture and fold through until well combined. Add the ground almonds and chocolate crumbs and fold to combine. You'll find that large bowl coming into play now. 

6 Whip the egg whites with a pinch of salt in a clean and dry electric mixer bowl fitted with the whisk attachment on high speed. When soft ribbons start to form, reduce the speed to medium and gradually add the remaining caster sugar, then beat until glossy and firm peaks form. Be careful not to overwhip.

7 Gently fold half the whipped meringue into the chocolate, pressing out any lumps of meringue that may have formed. Fold in remaining meringue, then pour the cake batter into the prepared tin and smooth the top with an offset palette knife. Scatter the coarsely chopped almonds evenly over the top of the cake and sprinkle with sea salt.

8 Place the cake tin into the water bath in the oven, ensuring the water comes halfway up the sides of the tin. If the tin starts to float, remove some of the water until it makes contact with the base of the tray again. Bake the cake for 25 minutes, then open the oven door and scatter the sour cherries over the top of the cake like a wreath. Reduce the oven temperature to 150°C, conventional (I kept the temperature the same) and bake the cake for a further 60 minutes.

9 Once this time is up, the cake will spring back when pressed in the middle, although it will still seem a little wobbly. Turn the oven off, leaving the cake in the oven with the oven door slightly ajar to cool for 1 hour. If your oven door doesn't stay ajar by itself, use a wooden spoon wedged into the door to allow the heat to escape. Cooling the cake this way will help it to set and reduce the dramatic sinking that flourless chocolate cakes usually encounter.

10 After 1 hour the cake can be removed from the oven and from the water bath to cool completely in the tin. Ideally, this cake should be set overnight or 'express set' in the fridge for 4 hours because it is very mousse-y and this will make it easier to remove from the tin. To unmould the cake, gently tug at the four strips of baking paper hanging over the rim to release the cake from the base. Then pull upwards, angling the cake at 45 degrees to slide it out onto a serving platter. Even better if you have a friend who can pull up on two of the strips as you pull up on the other two. I recommend using a hot knife to cut this cake. Sprinkle it with extra sea salt to serve. I like to serve it with clotted or thick cream.

11 There is no need to refrigerate this cake after it has been removed from the tin. If you have leftovers, just leave it out at room temperature.

The end result is an elegant, adult tasting chocolate cake with little bursts of sour from the cherries and texture from the toasted almonds. Definitely a fiddle to make but I think the end justifies the means.

See you all again tomorrow with another bake for Passover week 2025.

Bye for now,

Jillian

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