Chocolate cake (recipe 1897) - recipe with photo on Mcooker: best recipes

Cake on chocolate (recipe 1897)

Category: Easter

Ingredients
Flour	1 st
Water	90 ml
Pressed yeast	18-20 gr
Ground almonds	1.5 tbsp (200 gr)
Bitter almonds (grind)	10 pieces
Sugar	1 st
Yolks	10 pieces
Protein	6 pcs (175 ml)
Dark chocolate	60 g
Rum	60 ml
Red wine	60 ml
Rye crackers	1/4 st
Light raisins	50 g
Cinnamon	1/2 tsp
Vanilla	1 pod

Cooking method

The heritage of ancestors, the connection of times - for many, these are not empty words; behind them are family traditions and the bittersweet memory of childhood - after all, it is irrevocable ... and those who were there then left ...
And only on such special days, when old-old books and records are taken from the shelves, and Christmas gingerbread or Easter cakes are baked according to time-tested recipes - it seems that departed women of your kind are invisibly present in that almost ritual action with the dough that you repeat after them, who did this, maybe a hundred years before your birth ...
I did not know my grandmothers, the time of their life was too stormy, sweeping away and carrying away millions of people in the cycle of the pre-war years ... From the entire huge library that had been collected for more than one generation, only a few books remained after the war, two of them - culinary - "reached" me. And they were always perceived by me as a warm parting word from a distance from my great-great-grandmother, whom I did not see, but knew from my mother's memories of her first culinary experiences with grandmother Glyceria ...
And I took this unusual recipe for Easter cake from that same great-grandmother's book.
"A complete essential companion of urban and rural life" - this is the "simple" name at the source of this recipe ...
Dough:
Dissolve the yeast in warm water, mix with flour, beat and put in a warm place to rise.
Dough:
Grind the yolks with sugar until they are white, mix them into the dough after the first rise.
Add ground sweet and bitter almonds, grated chocolate, pour in rum and wine, add crushed rye crackers, spices, raisins.
Knock it all out well, leave it warm to rise.
Again beat, pour in the whipped whites, add flour, if the dough is watery, beat well and fold the dough into a mold greased with butter and sprinkled with crushed bread crumbs.
Immediately put in an oven preheated to 180 C and oven for 1-1.5 hours.
Remove from the oven, cool, laying on its side on something soft so that the cake does not jam.
Happy Easter!
I really wanted the photo to reveal the connection between the past and the present, so I took not only my great-grandmother's book with recipes, but also took out from the “storerooms” an old clock with a chime similar to a bell ringing - exciting sounds from my childhood ...
And sprouted wheat with bright red eggs - the old fashioned way; then it was customary to paint only red: the color of the sacrificial blood of Christ and the egg itself is a symbol of the rebirth of life ...
And as a link between generations - a satin ribbon with Easter letters XB, once embroidered by my ten-year-old daughter - with inept, but touching stitches ...
Kulich is very non-standard not only in appearance but also in taste!
For lovers of dense cakes with a rich taste: 20 grams of yeast cannot raise the dough, where there are more nuts and egg-sugar mixture than flour.
As I understand it, the dough is needed for the cake-yeast taste, and proteins take on the loosening role to a greater extent, so they must be mixed in carefully and not to interrupt the dough if you need to add flour. The consistency of the dough should be slightly thicker than for the pancakes.
The main rise of the dough will be during baking.
I indicated 1/2 of the amount of products in the recipe in Ingredients (see photo of the text).Enough to try and evaluate if this is your recipe.

Note

MY ADDITIONS AND SUBSTITUTIONS

Bitter almonds.
In many old recipes, along with the usual almonds, an additive of several pieces of bitter almonds is indicated - for the aroma, because the same almond smell is absent in the sweet, since the glycoside amygdalin responsible for the smell is contained only in bitter (well, also in peach, cherry and some apricot pits).

I mention this because you cannot eat bitter almonds without preliminary processing. Probably, many people remember from the literature what the most terrible poison smells like - potassium cyanide: bitter miindal ... And this is not figuratively, but in fact - chemically correct: the glycoside amygdalin is easily decomposed into sugar, benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide, the latter is the poisonous component. BUT - when heated (frying, calcining, boiling, baking), hydrogen cyanide evaporates (gas after all ...).

Well, so that everything does not look like a horror story, I will also mention that the lethal dose for an adult is 50 pieces of raw bitter tonsils, for children 10-15 pieces. BUT they are so bitter that you cannot accidentally poison yourself with them ... By the way, up to 2 pcs. per day for an adult - a therapeutic dose for certain diseases ...

Vanilla.

I already wrote that the cake has a very rich taste - nuts, and rum with wine, and chocolate ... But unfortunately, the aromas were not enough for me. If you express this in the language of oenology (an oenologist is an expert on wines), the cake turned out - "with a pleasant aroma, which, however, does not reach the concept of a bouquet"
Therefore, I now add real vanilla to the dough - it has a very delicate and multi-component aroma, unlike the simple vanillin that hits the olfactory receptors ... Fortunately, now it is not problematic to buy vanilla in the same "Perekrestok", Kotany company - there is also rubbed with powdered vanilla sugar, and pods.

Red wine.
In the original, they suggest pouring half a glass of lafita into the dough ... To understand what it is and what it can be replaced with today, I dived into the Internet and caught a very interesting historical background of such a prevalence of this particular brand of French wine in Russia at the end of the 19th century.

Lafite (Chateau Lafite, Chateau "Lafite-Rothschild")

- red wine from France of Bordeaux type from the Medoc district, which became widespread in Russia in the last third of the 19th century as one of the main types of imported wine.

The Lafite vineyards were bought by the Rothschilds in 1868, who made their loan to the tsarist government obligatory for Russia to import lafite, and in quite significant quantities. This circumstance contributed to the fact that the word "lafit" through the press and mainly through the wine-trading network became known in the widest popular circles and eventually became a synonym for any expensive foreign wine.

The bouquet of Lafitte wines is very pleasant, with incomparable elegance; its taste contains both almond and violet hints, and it is impossible to understand which dominates.

Lafite has always been appreciated not only for its healing properties, delicate play of aromatic nuances and silk texture, but also for its fantastic, hard to explain longevity. Lafite is idolized by collectors and auctioneers. Expecting a century-old lafite not to be killed by time is in the order of things.

Well, the corresponding price ... from 1200 r to 4000 r for a bottle of a 3-year-old. (Obviously not for cooking)
Since the Georgian wines disappeared from the shelves, we stopped (in search of a replacement) on a solid red dry from TOSO vineyards, Mendosa region, Argentina (in this kulich - Malbek - Bonarda).