Sous Vide Flourless Chocolate Cake

Decadent, 3-ingredient, single serve Sous Vide Flourless Chocolate Cake made with passion fruit infused dark chocolate topped with whipped coconut cream.

This weekend's sousvidesista (my alter ego) sous vide-along instalment delivered a chocolatey dose of decadence in mini jars of Sous Vide Flourless Chocolate Cake!

Three ingredients - dark chocolate, eggs and butter. Simple, but huge on taste, with passion fruit infused dark chocolate as the main ingredient topped with vanilla bean speckled, whipped coconut cream.

Flourless Cake

OK, I say cake, but it's more like a fudgy brownie, but with a hint of passion fruit, thanks to the Itakuja dark chocolate. I initially planned to make a sous vide version of this flourless cake we made back in school, but it requires a little more perfecting.

Instead, I thought I would keep it stupid simple with this recipe I long ago adapted from Anova and made a number of times in a number of ways - milk chocolate, flavoured chocolate, milk and dark chocolate, vanilla bean, cinnamon, fruit, alcohol. It can easily be scaled up, which is what I do when looking for something simple to feed a crowd.

Sous Vide Setup

Before the more economical, convenient immersion cookers came on the market, we had a bulky beast that we hardly ever used. Although it was a nicely contained unit, it did not allow for the preparation of large cuts of meat, and we make a lot of large cuts.

Then in 2013, the Anova precision cooker launched and we snatched it up STAT. We had lots of concerns about cooking with plastic, so we limited our preparations to mason jar friendly recipes. Once we felt comfortable with the then current research around plastics, we went all in.

So much so, that we now own three precision cookers, Anova and Joule, for those times we want to cook a number of things at different temperatures all at once - think entertaining a crowd.

For small items, we attach the cookers to cast iron pots, a stainless steel stock pot for extra tall jars, or polycarbonate container for large cuts of meat and batch cooking.

Cooking In Jars

I love cooking in jars, especially when guests take them home and we don't have to worry about doing dishes. They are quite affordable, when purchased in bulk and don't add to the waste problem.

But they are glass and are susceptible to chips, cracks and breaks. To lessen instances of such mishaps, here are a few tricks:

• avoid thermal shock, by keeping the glass at a similar temperature as the water bath. I talked about placing them on the lid of the sous vide bath as the water heats and soaking them in a bowl of warm water in this post.
• another option is to add them to the water bath as it is heating, so that the jars heat along (as seen in the video below).
• another common cause of cracks and breaks, is overly tightened caps. This causes pressure to build in the glass, when submerged, and with no available means of escape, one is created. This happened to me a couple times when I was starting out and my heart broke when I stepped in the kitchen and saw the contents floating around in the water bath. So tighten the caps only finger-tip tight to allow air to escape, but no water in.

Flawless Flavour

I think most people think white chocolate when they ponder passion fruit pairings and that works great - see here. But it also works amazingly with milk chocolate and, in this case dark chocolate.

I first experienced Itakuja 55% from Valrhona a couple years ago, when I attended a workshop led by one of their chefs, Sarah Tibbets. It's a single-origin, dark chocolate, double fermented with passion fruit. Naturally, I immediately fell in love.

With eggs and butter as the only other ingredients in this brownie-adjacent cake, the chocolate flavour is perfectly pronounced. Topped with whipped coconut and fresh passion fruit, it becomes a tropical hallelujah moment, or two.

I used the Sultan piping tip to pipe the whipped coconut onto the cakes, like I did with these. I love the cool design and the vessel it provides for adding fillings down the center of the topping.

Also works well with a dollop of ice cream, especially while the cake is still warm and fresh berries or compote of your liking. I also love it on its own, still warm form the bath. YUMMMMM!

I am still working on producing a less dense texture cake that could hold its own beside an oven-baked cake. You'll be the first to know when I do...