Do you have a recipe that has changed your life? I think that this cake changed my life not once, but twice. Because of its importance to me and because it’s the recipe that friends and family most often ask me for, I’ve chosen to write about it to participate in Sugar High Friday, a food blogger event started by Jennifer of the Domestic Goddess. This month is Sugar High Friday #27: Chocolate by Brand. It’s being hosted by David Lebovitz, the dessert guru who lives in Paris.

The first life changing experience happened when I was living in France during high school in the mid-80s. I was 18. Flourless chocolate cake with cr?me anglaise was the it dessert that year. I ate the best version of this cake and I learned how to make the custard sauce at my friend Myriam’s house. Myriam was my classmate and because she was also a new student at our school and from the south of France, she was an outsider, like me. She was also more sophisticated and a lot smarter than most of the other students. Early on in that year I chose to sit next to her in class. At first, I mostly copied her notes and imitated her oh-so-French handwriting, because I couldn’t really understand the teachers. By the end of the year, I was able to follow along just fine and we had become close friends. Myriam started inviting me to her house on a regular basis to help me out with my French homework and to prepare together for the first part of the baccalaur?at, the exam in French that we would pass at the end of the year and that the rest of my classmates would finish the following year with tests in all of the other subjects.

Myriam’s parents had sent her “up to Paris” to live with her grandparents for the last two years of high school so that she would be at a better school and get better preparation for the baccalaur?at than she would have in her village in the Pyr?n?es, where she had literally attended a one-room school house. Myriam’s grandparents had been through the war and they talked about it as though it had happened yesterday. Of course they called World War II just “the war.” They had met in 1936, when they were both working at La Samaritaine. She worked in sales and he worked in the restaurant (before that he had worked as a cook for the train line that ran from Paris to Milan). They wouldn’t have met at all, except for the fact that 1936 was an important year for worker’s rights in France and La Samaritaine was the site of some of the first sit-in strikes. So they met amid political and social upheaval and were married and then separated by the war, he was a prisoner in a camp, she stuck it out in Paris, neither had much to eat for a long stretch. The rationing didn’t end until 1949. They showed me the ration books. They pulled out pictures, memorabilia, maps. They talked about their gratitude toward the Americans. Some of it was boring, they often repeated themselves. I politely listened. Myriam would sometimes roll her eyes at me when they weren’t looking, these were stories she’d heard too many times.

Myriam’s grandmother had her husband on a short leash. He wasn’t allowed to drink unless they had guests. He had Myriam invite me over every chance he could get. I think that he liked having me over not just to drink, but to share it with me. The wine cellar took up more than 500 square feet of space in their basement. He would cook special dishes and show us the important steps. He would bring out several wines for a several course meal, showing me how to evaluate the color and body of a wine, how to smell its perfume, how to taste it. Myriam complained about the food at her grandparents’ house. She was a proponent of the nouvelle cuisine, which was still pretty new, and she disliked all the cream and butter that her grandparents used in their cooking. Neither of us knew how lucky we were.

One Sunday, Myriam invited me over for a study session to be followed by dinner. I remember it in a strangely clear way. We were in her attic bedroom. It was white and blue and luminous. She had pulled out about 50 pages of notes on the history of theater, all written on grid-lined paper in indigo blue ink. She was telling me about the Greeks. I remember thinking that I had so much to learn and I was never going to pass that exam. Her grandfather called up to us and we clattered down the stairs and into the kitchen. He was making cr?me anglaise. He had us stir the milk to keep a skin from forming on the top. He showed us how to temper the eggs. He had us watch closely as tiny bubbles formed a ring all around the perimeter, next to the walls of the pan. Stirring slowly and watching, he told us to smell, that the nose could help enormously in knowing when something was ready. Then it happened, a puff of steam came up from the pot and the top of the sauce got less opaque and visibly thicker at the same time. It was done. He didn’t use a thermometer; he just used his eyes and his nose. I didn’t get to see him making the cake; he had done that the day before so the flavors would have time to meld. As he put the sauce away in the refrigerator to chill, Myriam and I hurried back up the stairs to continue our discussion about tragedy and Racine. Dinner was fairly simple. There was a first course of sliced tomatoes, onions and cucumbers liberally doused with vinegar and oil, a sprinkle of salt and pepper. The main dish was a roast, I think it was veal, with carrots and potatoes cooked with it in the roasting pan, these were soft in the middle, salty and caramelized on the side that had faced down or stuck to the side of the pan. A salad and cheese came next, then the dessert. They served the pieces of cake on little plates with some of the custard sauce on the side. We sipped champagne from old-fashioned coupes rather than flutes. The feeling of well-being after a good day and a good dinner is incomparable and practically impossible to describe. Finishing the piece of cake and the final sips of champagne, I thought, this is what life is supposed to be like, this is how I want to spend my life. With spoons and pots and books and friends. And this cake.

These memories were with me when I was finishing graduate school about ten years later. I wanted to make a cake for a friend’s birthday, so I started looking for a recipe for this chocolate cake. I had a few cookbooks in those days, but I was a poor graduate student and all my extra money went into books for my research. If I wanted a recipe, I’d usually take 3×5 cards and go to Border’s where I would look through all of the cookbooks and copy out the recipe I wanted. If I started using a particular book a lot, I would buy it. So, a couple of days before the day of the party, I took my 3×5 cards, went to Border’s and browsed through all of the dessert books. That’s how I discovered Maida Heatter and her Best Dessert Book Ever. I copied out the recipe for “The H?tel de Crillon’s Chocolate Cake.” The next day, I came up with a menu, I went to the grocery store, I bought the ingredients for everything I wanted to make for the party. That evening was cool and stormy, odd for June in Michigan. I had a friend come over to help out. A near disaster struck when the electricity went out in the apartment. The wind had knocked down a wire nearby. I had a gas cook top, but the oven was electric. The cake was only half-way through cooking. We were almost all of the way through a bottle of wine. In my tipsy state, I just calmly said, well, it’s still hot in the oven, I’ll just leave it in for a couple of hours and proceed as though nothing had happened. So that is what I did and the cake was fine. The next day at the party, everyone ate up all the food, drank all the wine, and gobbled up every bit of the cake. How did this cake change my life this time? My husband Erik says it wasn’t the cake, but I remember seeing him eat it, watching his face as he ate first one piece, then another. We started spending a lot more time with each other after that party. We were engaged several months later, the night he tried this cake the second time. I bought the book and we’ve made the cake together countless times since then. It’s even better when baked properly.

I’ve used several different recipes for this type of cake over the last ten years. I tried Maida Heatter’s other flourless chocolate cake, the Queen Mother’s cake with almonds, but I prefer a more pure chocolate flavor. I’ve settled on using powdered sugar. It dissolves better and the small amount of corn starch used to keep the sugar from clumping up gives the cake a better texture. For some time, I used coffee to make this a mocha cake or coffee in the cr?me anglaise, or a coffee ice cream instead of the custard, but the caffeine keeps me awake, and I don’t like the flavor of decaffeinated coffee. Because the Sugar High Friday theme is chocolate by brand, I recommend Ghirardelli 60% cacao Bittersweet chocolate chips, what they used to call double chocolate, but they’ve recently changed the name. I also use Ghirardelli unsweetened cocoa powder. The Ghirardelli website has some really good recipes and video demonstrations on working with chocolate. They even have a video for a decadent flourless chocolate torte, which is two of these cakes put together and frosted with a chocolate whipped cream frosting. I prefer the classic one layer, dense, almost fudge-like cake, dusted simply with cocoa and served in a pool of cr?me anglaise. The cake itself is really easy, just mix everything up in a double boiler, pour it into the pan and slide it into a water bath in the oven.

After the first experience, my idea of chocolate cake was changed. My platonic ideal, my internal understanding of chocolate cakeness was transformed from the Bill Knapp’s chocolate birthday cake of my childhood into this, an almost brownie-like dense, rich cake, a cake more true to the essence of chocolate. After making this cake over and over again and passing the recipe out to friends and family, I see it has that effect on other people, too. You’ve been warned.

Flourless chocolate cake with cr?me anglaise

• 8 ounces Ghirardelli 60% cocoa bittersweet chocolate
• 8 ounces butter (1 stick)
• 3/4 cup of powdered sugar
• 1 pinch salt
• 5 eggs
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 1 T flour
• Cr?me anglaise for serving (see below)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and place a jelly roll pan on a rack in the middle of the oven and pour in approximately 3/4 of an inch of water. Butter a nine inch round cake pan. Line the pan with parchment paper, use the outside of the pan as a guide, tracing around the pan with a pencil and cutting just inside your line to make the paper fit the pan. Place paper in pan. Butter the paper. Mix 1 tablespoon of the cocoa with the 1 tablespoon flour and use this mixture to flour the pan (this is a tip from Maida Heatter, as she says, the cocoa will turn the flour brown so that the flour won’t mar the appearance of the finished cake). Set pan aside.

Bring a small amount of water to boil in the bottom of a double boiler and turn heat to low. Place chocolate, butter, sugar and salt in top of double boiler (a stainless steel or pyrex bowl works to do this job) and place it over the simmering water. Stir the chocolate mixture occasionally with a whisk until it is almost melted. Place the top of the double boiler on a kitchen towel on the countertop and let it cool slightly. Whisk in the eggs one at a time and give the mixture a few more strokes until it is thick and shiny. Pour batter into prepared pan, give it a few taps on the counter to get out any air bubbles and to smooth the surface, place it in the water bath in the oven and bake until cake is almost set, but still a little wobbly in the middle, about 40 minutes. Remove cake from oven and let cool for about 2 hours, then use a paring knife to loosen the sides and turn it over onto a cake plate. You may need to give the pan a good thwack to get the cake to come out. Make sure that the cake has loosened completely from the cake pan, but leave the pan on top of the cake and place it in the refrigerator for at least 8 hours, preferably overnight. Remove the cake from the refrigerator about 2 hours before you’ll be ready to serve it. Take off the cake pan and remove the parchment paper. Clean up the sides of the cake using a warmed knife, if necessary. Put some cocoa powder into a sieve and sprinkle it all over the cake. You can make a design on the top by putting a paper doily or some cut out hearts, or both if you’re making this for Valentine’s day, for instance. Cut the cake using a sharp knife and either rinse the knife or wipe it with a damp paper towel in between cuts. Spoon a little cr?me anglaise onto each plate and put a piece of cake on top of the sauce.

Serves 12.

Cr?me anglaise

• 2 cups whole milk
• 1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 4 large egg yolks, lightly beaten

Bring the milk to a boil with the vanilla and the sugar, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly. Whisk 1/2 cup milk mixture into the eggs and whisk this mixture into the pot with the rest of the milk mixture. Place on low heat and whisk for 5 or 6 minutes until small bubbles just begin to appear in the sauce around the edge of the pan and the sauce is thickened slightly. Do not let it boil or you will have a mass of scrambled eggs in sweetened milk. Strain the sauce into a container, cover and chill until ready to serve.

After making the cr?me anglaise, I rinse off the vanilla bean and let it dry completely on a piece of paper towel. I break it into a few pieces and use it to flavor sugar. This is great in many recipes and I especially love a small spoonful of it in a cup of Earl Grey Tea.