AI photoChocolate Cake with Pistachios and Hazelnuts
A rich chocolate and ricotta cake studded with hazelnuts and pistachios, warmed with cinnamon, ginger and vanilla.
Labels are worked out automatically from the ingredients and can be wrong. Check the packaging if it matters to you.
Ingredients
- 250 g Dark chocolate
- 230 g Caster sugar
- 500 g Ricotta
- 150 g Hazelnuts
- 150 g Pistachios
- 4 pcs Eggs
- 1 tsp Cinnamon
- 1 tsp Ginger
- 1 pcs Vanilla pod
- 1 tbsp Plain flour
- Butter to taste, for greasing the tin
- 1 pinch Salt
- Icing sugar to taste, for dusting
Steps
Break the dark chocolate into small pieces and melt over a bain-marie or in the microwave, then let it cool.
Roughly chop the hazelnuts, then the pistachios, and stir a tablespoon of flour into the chopped nuts.
Push the ricotta through a sieve and beat it with the egg yolks and sugar until soft and light.
Fold the chopped nuts, melted chocolate, ginger, cinnamon and the seeds from the vanilla pod into the mixture, and combine.
Whisk the egg whites with a pinch of salt to stiff peaks, then gently fold into the prepared mixture.
Heat the oven to 180°C.
Grease a 22 cm round tin with butter and line it with baking paper.
Pour the batter into the tin and let it settle on its own.
Bake the cake for 20-25 minutes, checking with a wooden skewer for doneness.
23 minRemove the cake from the oven and let it cool completely.
Dust with icing sugar and serve.
This is not really a chocolate cake. It's a cheesecake wearing a chocolate cake's coat — ricotta is the body, chocolate is the flavour, and the flour is there in a quantity so small it barely counts as structure. That's the whole trick of it: no butter in the batter, no creaming sugar and fat together, because the fat here is cheese and the lift comes from egg whites, not from raising agent.
What decides whether this works is the sieve and the fold. Pushing ricotta through a sieve isn't fussy ritual — ricotta straight from the tub has curd lumps that stay lumps in the oven; a cake that looks "set" on top can still taste grainy in the middle because nobody broke those curds down first. And the egg whites: beaten to stiff peaks, then folded in gently, not stirred — because this cake has almost no flour to hold air structurally, so the air has to come from the eggs themselves and survive the mixing. Stir hard and you knock that air straight back out; the cake bakes flat and dense instead of lightly cracked and soufflé-ish at the edges.
Some say a chocolate cake needs lots of flour to "hold together." No — this one holds together because egg yolks and melted chocolate set like a custard when they cool, the same way a baked cheesecake sets. The flour here (one tablespoon, tossed through the nuts, not the batter) is just there to stop the nuts sinking to the bottom while it bakes — that's its only job.
Dark chocolate is the backbone of flavour, but choose it by cocoa percentage, not by brand loyalty — something in the 60-70% range gives you bitterness to balance all that ricotta and sugar; go much higher and the cake turns bitter rather than rich, go much lower (like standard milk chocolate) and it's just sweet mush. Melt it gently — bain-marie or short bursts in the microwave — because scorched chocolate seizes into a grainy paste, and no amount of folding fixes that afterwards.
Ricotta: buy the firmer, drier kind sold for baking if you can find it, not the wet, almost-pourable tub meant for spreading on toast. Wet ricotta brings extra water into a batter with very little flour to absorb it, and that water has nowhere to go but into a soggier crumb. If all you've got is the wet kind, tip it into the sieve and leave it a while before you push it through — let gravity do some of the drying first.
Hazelnuts and pistachios together aren't decorative — they're the texture the flour isn't providing. Toast the hazelnuts lightly first if yours taste flat (shop-bought ones often sit on shelves longer than you'd think), and chop both nuts roughly, not fine — fine chopping turns them to dust that disappears into the batter, roughly chopped they give you something to bite against. No pistachios to hand? Walnuts work on cost and crunch, though you lose that faint green sweetness pistachios bring — that's a genuine loss, not a like-for-like swap, so know what you're trading.
Cinnamon, ginger and vanilla are there to argue gently with the chocolate's bitterness and stop the whole thing tasting one-note. Use a real vanilla pod if the budget allows it — the seeds give flecks and a rounder flavour than extract — but a teaspoon of good vanilla extract is a fair stand-in, not a downgrade to be ashamed of. Ground ginger rather than fresh here, because fresh ginger brings water and fibre you don't want in a batter this delicate.
Butter only shows up for greasing the tin, and that's worth noticing — this is a lean cake by cake standards, all its richness borrowed from cheese, chocolate and nuts rather than poured in as fat. Line the tin with paper as well as greasing it; a cake this moist and nut-studded will cling stubbornly to bare metal, and tearing it getting it out undoes all the care you took folding the egg whites.
Serve it cool, properly cool, not oven-warm — it needs to firm up the way a cheesecake does, and cutting into it hot gets you a collapsed wedge rather than a clean slice. Dust the icing sugar on just before it goes to the table, since sugar sitting on a damp surface for an hour turns translucent and sad. Six people, one 22cm tin — small slices, since it's dense and rich enough that nobody's asking for seconds the size of the first.