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From Portugal, we all know and love the delicious pasteis de nata, the crispy puff pastry baskets filled with a cream based on eggs, milk and sugar, cooked at high temperature until the characteristic, slightly caramelised surface is obtained (even better if sprinkled with icing sugar or cinnamon). But recently the internet has dubbed the Lisbon Chocolate Cake super viral.
On Reddit, some users have no problem calling it the best chocolate cake they have ever eaten, enthusiastic reviews are flocking on TikTok and the article written in 2019 by Dorie Greenspan, an American author of cookbooks, is back viral along with her recipe that explains step by step how to recreate the three-layer chocolate cake at home. After trying it and literally falling in love wit it, Greenspan managed to create a version very faithful to the original recipe: “I bought a slice to eat on the flight back to Paris and the next day I tried to make it again at home, the author wrote in the New York Times. In the end I got a flourless, full-bodied chocolate cake with a whipped ganache and a dessert that, like all my favourites, is wonderful in its simplicity.”
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Lisbon Cake doesn't actually even have an official name, and for a long time the recipe was jealously guarded by Sophie Landeau, founder of Chocolate Landeau, the pastry shop where she invented the dessert herself: “On December 21, 2010, I inaugurated the doors of the first Landeau Chocolate, on the first floor of the main building of Lx Factory: it wouldn't be fair to say that this was a dream come true, because what Landeau Chocolate has become is much more than I had ever dreamed. When, in February of that same year, I decided to reinvent a chocolate cake, I had no idea that one day it would be known and recognised all over the world,” she said on Instagram.
For years, the menu remained very small (chocolate cake, tea, coffee and some liqueur wine) precisely to underline the simplicity of the concept; then the brand expanded, and today it has four addresses in the Portuguese capital: in Chiado, Alcântara, Campo de Ourique and a space inside the El Corte Inglés shopping center. Most tourists, however, continue to frequent the original location, the one located inside the Lx Factory.
Almost all the descriptions agree that it is a dessert that plays on different textures of dark chocolate. It is not a classic stuffed cake: the base is a thick, moist dough, similar to brownie, with a compact but soft structure. Above the base there is a layer of chocolate cream, halfway between a ganache and a mousse: silky, whipped, with a 'velour' texture, which makes the taste creamy without being cloying. Everything is finished with a coating of bitter cocoa powder, generously sieved over the surface. The dry and intense layer adds a more bitter note and reinforces the dark character of the dessert.
The cake, Greenspan writes, is “Coated with cocoa, so much cocoa that it cannot be considered a decoration, it is actually a third component. Each fork is a complete composition: the textures go from compact to light, the flavours increase in intensity.” In short, just like the Belém Tower, it's an unmissable stop in Lisbon.
Read the original article on ELLE Italy.