Bittersweet Chocolate Almond Torte

Happy Easter! (Belatedly). I hope everyone got to sing a few hymns and got plenty of chocolate in their Easter baskets this year.

This year I was a little over-ambitious. I had plans to make lots of elaborate desserts to impress my family, who have been effectively conditioned into dessert snobs by my mom and aunts, and my boyfriend's family, with whom I was spending my first Easter, gulp. I wanted to impress.

Well, I need to work on my time management... what with work, a rare social life, and church looming early in the morning, I didn't quite find time to bake as extravagantly as I would have liked. Alas, no towering carrot cake, no tiered chocolate torte, no piped rose petals in the icing.

However, I did manage to find time to make a simple chocolate almond torte, even if that time was hurried and hectic and at 7:30 a.m. Luckily,  this torte is a pretty simple and fun process, plus I got to eat chocolate for breakfast (so what, it's Easter!). The result is pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.

Bittersweet Chocolate Almond Torte  inspired by Country Living's, chocolate-almond torte

Ingredients:
2 sticks plus 2 TB unsalted butter, cut into pieces. Use some more to butter the pan.
9 ounces good dark chocolate (I used bittersweet)
6 large eggs, separated
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup almonds, finely chopped
1/4 cup slivered almonds, toasted, for garnish
1 TB hot fudge, for garnish

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 10-inch springform cake pan. You can use a regular cake pan, but this makes it ten times easier to get the cake out without deforming it.
Melt together butter and chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. Stir until combined. Set aside to cool.

Mmm chocolate. Very hot chocolate

In a large bowl, whisk egg yolks with sugar until pale and fluffy. Pour melted chocolate mixture into the egg mixture, stirring constantly. Fold in almonds.

In a separate bowl, using an electric mixer set on medium-high speed, beat egg whites until stiff peaks form. Fold egg whites into chocolate mixture until just combined. Pour into pan and bake for 35 minutes. The torte will be very moist in the middle, yum. Let cool completely in the pan, about an hour.

 When it cools, toast some slivered almonds on the stove. To toast, heat some butter in a pan, add almonds, voila. Arrange toasted almonds on top of the torte. To make it even more decadent, heat some hot fudge and add a teaspoon a milk and drizzle it over the torte to make it extra pretty.

What could be bad about lots of butter and chocolate mixed together! This is powerful, rich, dense, not very sweet, and delicious. It's not a torte for the faint of heart, I will say that.

Happy Easter!