My Friend Ana who loves Chocolate Cake but not Frosting

I've been broke lately. So broke, in fact, that eating out has become a thing of the past (at least for this month). The phrase: "Eat to live, don't live to eat", one I've always loathed or scoffed at, has become my new mantra. I hate this mantra! Food is my life, my happiness, my essence. I was just beginning to forget how wonderful and joyful it once made me feel and then…

My friend Ana turned 30.

As I had no money to buy her a present, I offered to make her a cake. She told me she wanted something chocolate but no frosting. She doesn't like frosting, "It just gets in the way," she said. So I set off to create the Best (and most cost efficient) Chocolate, No Frosting Cake I could muster. Nigella Lawson published a brilliant flourless chocolate cake recipe in the New York Times Magazine several years ago as a Passover dessert. It was The hit of our seder when I made it then and I remembered it had only a few ingredients. It would be perfect.

But I couldn't find the recipe anywhere. It's not in "Domestic Goddess", I couldn't find it in the NY Times archive, it was a phantom. I finally dug it up on a random Google search (about five pages in) and any fellow hunters will find it below. For Ana's birthday, I decorated the sunken top with fresh raspberries (at her request and surprisingly tasty despite the winter month) and heaping dollops of whipped cream.

As I looked around at the faces of my friends digging their forks into the dense, fallen chocolate cake soothed by a mound of cool, vanilla laced whipped cream and the burst of a fresh berry, I was reminded of two things:
1. You can feed yourself divinely even on the cheap.
2. No matter how bad things get, cake will always make it better.

To Ana, Nigella and anyone who refuses to eat Ramen.

p.s. Please pardon our matching striped shirts in the photo. That was NOT intentional.