Today marks the first anniversary of this daily recipe column, so to celebrate I baked myself a cake.

The baking of a good cake is a knee-jerk reaction to any form of celebration, something instilled by all those fancy birthday cakes during our formative years. They are milestones shaped in flour, butter and icing, their shapes changing as our lives change, from Thomas the Tank Engine to the 21st key, from pink and girly round to white and virginal square.

There is cake at a graduation, a wedding — or even weddings — a christening, and there should always be a good, solid fruit cake at a wake, for its stabilising influence.

But there is one well-known and well-loved cake that I go to for all manner of celebrations: a rich, flourless chocolate cake adapted from an Elizabeth David recipe in French Provincial Cooking. She simply calls it a chocolate and almond cake, although I believe it is also known as Reine de Saba, or Queen of Sheba. Rich and intense, it rises slightly in the oven only to deflate, crack and wrinkle into a rustic mess as it cools — all part of its charm. It makes a fabulous dinner-party pudding with crème fraiche or custard, is even better as a celebration cake dusted with icing sugar or cocoa powder, and is particularly good, I must say, for breakfast.

Of the 260 recipes in the past twelve months, this is one of my favourites.

As Shirley Maclaine so wisely said: “I love fruit, but I’d just as soon have a piece of cake.”

Ingredients
Serves 6

Prep: 20 min
Cook: 50 min

200g dark, bitter chocolate
1 tbsp strong espresso coffee
1 tbsp rum or brandy
150g caster sugar
150g butter
100g ground almonds
5 eggs, separated
Icing sugar for dusting

METHOD

Melt the chocolate, coffee, rum or brandy, sugar and butter in a bowl sitting in a pot of barely simmering water. Remove from the heat and stir until well mixed.

Add the ground almonds and mix well. Beat in the egg yolks, one by one.

Beat the egg whites until stiff and peaky, and stir a couple of spoonfuls into the chocolate mixture to lighten it, before gently folding in the rest.

Turn into a buttered and floured 20cm (8in) round or square cake tin and bake at 180C/Gas 4 for 40 to 50 minutes (less if you like it fudgey, more if you like it cakey).

Leave to cool before removing gently from the tin, and dust with icing sugar to serve.

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