Ingredients
· 200g 70% dark chocolate
· 100g salted butter
· 4 eggs
· 150g icing sugar
· 150g hazelnut meal
· ¾ cup roasted hazelnuts, roughly chopped
Method
1. Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Grease a 20cm spring form cake tin with butter and lightly dust with flour. Set aside.
2. Place chocolate and butter into a small microwave safe bowl. Microwave at 10 second intervals, stirring until melted. Set aside. (You could also do this over a double boiler if you have more patience than me and can be bothered waiting for the water to come to the boil.)
3. Separate the eggs, placing egg whites into a medium sized mixing bowl and setting aside the egg yolks in a larger mixing bowl.
4. Beat egg whites using an electric mixer with a wire whip until soft peaks form. Set aside.
5. Add icing sugar to the bowl with the egg yolks and use your electric mixer and a wire whip (just rinse the one you used for the egg whites) on high for 5-6 minutes or until light and fluffy.
6. Reduce mixer speed to low and slowly pour melted chocolate mixture in. Mix until well combined.
7. Add hazelnut meal to the mixture, mixing until well combined.
8. Remove bowl from the mixer and gently fold through the egg whites using a rubber spatula. Finally, fold through the hazelnuts.
9. Pour the cake mixture into prepared cake tin and cook for 30-35 minutes or until cooked. Please note that this cake is totally supposed to have a gooey centre so don't stress out when you insert a skewer and it's still a little wet inside, that's what you want!
10. Leave to cool for 10 minutes before removing cake from the tin and allowing to cool completely before serving.