"MsAdventures" Flourless Nutella cake

So I had a bad week. I was meant to be making this cake with someone, but they couldn't make it in the end, and I didn't want to let the 6 eggs I had bought go to waste (plus half the point was the fact that it is World Nutella Day today) so I decided to make it anyway.

I did try to think of my own thing for World Nutella Day, I really did. I went through stages of Nutella choc au pains (done), Nutella marble cake (also done). I got so far with the nutella marble cake recipe, using a peanut butter cake recipe as the base, wrote it all out.... and then realised there were several out there, and in my denial and desperate hope that I was being original, I didn't look until I was quite a way through my witchlike nutella-based potion-recipe-writing. If you'll excuse the terrible simile and over-hyphenation (oh the irony).

So yes, I will probably make my nutella marble cake at some point. And I will definitely spend the next year scheming away thinking of amazing nutella recipes no-one has thought of yet so I can surprise you all next year.

So, deciding to be safe and tread the path better-known, I went for the well reviewed recipe by one of the founders of World Nutella Day, MsAdventures in Italy. You can get the recipe on her website (see below), but I also bought the World Nutella Day ebook for my Kindle, which was only about a quid and had the recipe in too, amongst a few others (the Italian-style hot chocolate with nutella is high on my list, along with the Drunken Devil's Food Espresso Cupcakes with Nutella Filling, though I can't make cupcakes in my student kitchen because of lack of a muffin/cupcake tin. Buying the book is worth it mainly for the "10 reasons why Nutella is better than a boyfriend" list, which gave me a really good laugh.

I now have just under a kilo of nutella here too (the big jars were on offer) so there's plenty of nutella for me to use in recipes! This one seemed like the best one to celebrate the actual day, though (but I got confused and wished everyone Happy Nutella Day for tomorrow, doh...).

Well, overall it went sort of OK, though I don't know if I'd make it again. I think that's mainly my fault, because when told to whisk the eggs into stiff, not soft, peaks, I took it to an extreme and ended up with a giant ball of froth that could actually be picked up with the whisk. Still, it seemed to mix in okay, so maybe that wasn't it. There is, of course, the issue with our DEFINITELY slow/cold oven... I cooked this for 35 minutes instead of the allotted 20-30, and I still think it could have done with a few more minutes in retrospect. You can see the very different texture from the picture! It is an odd mixture of dense and very light and airy... quite bizzare. I liked it but I'm not sure how it'll go down - I always give away 9/10ths of the cake to the people on my floor, so I'm terrified they won't like it :P

Also, never substitute silicone pans for springform. Because I could NOT get this out in one piece (got covered in cocoa trying) and had to cut it up to get it out of the tin.

But you know what? I'm still sitting here really struggling not to eat the piece I've got for tomorrow, and I somewhat get the feeling that it's one of those cakes that will get better with age. So, depending on how it matures, I might make it again. I'll update you tomorrow...

Happy world Nutella day, peeps :)

Get the recipe here.