A Fabulous Hazelnut Torte

For Thanksgiving last week I baked my traditional contributions to the feast hosted each year by our friends Michele and Charles: a dessert and a bread. The dessert this time was a hazelnut torte, and the bread a focaccia. I’ve written about my focaccia before, so today I want to talk about the torte, which is a paragon of simplicity and flavor.

Now, don’t laugh at its appearance:  I’m hopeless at cake decoration, and I had a lot of luscious icing that I couldn’t bear not to use. Those wobbly rosettes were all I was capable of. Gorgeous it wasn’t, but it was very, very good.

This easy, delicious recipe was given to me by my Italian friend Maria over 30 years ago. It was her adaptation of a recipe from a British magazine, which she’d written up for herself in Italian. My copy, a yellowed sheet of paper, never translated but now heavily annotated by me, has had an honored place in my recipe binder ever since.

The only thing slightly labor-intensive about it is shelling and toasting the hazelnuts (if you don’t have a ready-prepared supply on hand, as I do). Even that isn’t so bad, because you don’t have to rub off the nuts’ brown inner skin, which is a maddening task. Eight minutes in a 350° oven is all it takes, if you need to.

To make the cake, I energetically whisked together 2 jumbo eggs and ⅜ cup of sugar; added 1 tablespoon of flour, 1¼ teaspoon of baking powder, and 1 cup of ground hazelnuts; transferred the batter to a buttered and floured 8-inch pan, and baked it at 350° for 20 minutes.

This is a delightful cake just as is, or with a dollop of whipped cream. For home consumption, I usually stop right there. It tastes and feels light on the palate, nut-sweet rather than sugar-sweet. For Thanksgiving, I wanted something dressier, so I went on to make Maria’s recipe for the icing, which is also amazingly easy.

I stirred 2 tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa powder, 2½ tablespoons of powdered sugar, and a few drops of vanilla extract into a cup of heavy cream. Whipped on high speed in my heavy-duty mixer, the combination turned into a luscious buttercream icing in less than a minute. It too wasn’t sugar-sweet or heavy – a gentle mocha kiss is more like it.

I know that, strictly speaking, a torte should have more than one layer. The full written recipe, which serves 12, calls for 2 cakes, to be sliced in half horizontally and assembled with 3 internal layers of icing. With only 6 of us dining on Thanksgiving, I made just the single cake. If I’d had a slightly smaller pan, the cake would have been thicker and I could have halved it. But with a cake only an inch high, it was too risky to attempt. Nobody at the festive table seemed to mind the absence of internal icing: Maybe the rosettes made up for it.

The torte went beautifully with the wine-poached pears that were the other dessert of the day.