Kladdkaka (Sticky Chocolate Cake with No Leavening)

Variations

• Looser or firmer: the baking time is the whole of it. Ten minutes leaves the middle close to a sauce; eighteen takes it over towards a brownie. Leaving the recipe alone and moving only the clock is how this cake is adjusted.
• Espresso or salted caramel: a teaspoon of instant coffee in the batter sharpens the cocoa.
• To serve: whipped cream and raspberries are the standard, and vanilla ice cream is common. The cold thing beside it is not decoration; it is the temperature contrast.
• Baked in a skillet: served in a small cast-iron pan, residual heat keeps working on the middle, so take it out a minute or two earlier.
• The name: Swedish kladdig means sticky or messy. The cake states in its own name what it is going to do.

Tips

• Nothing lifts this cake, and that is the design. Every cake gets its rise from somewhere, and the pages next to this one each name their source. Pound cake: "Four ingredients and no raising agent, so the only thing lifting it is air beaten into the butter and sugar." Genoise: "A sponge cake with no raising agent at all, aerated by whipping whole eggs." Mille-feuille: "Puff pastry has no yeast in it: the only thing lifting it is water in the butter layers turning to steam." All three say there is no raising agent and then name what stands in for one. Kladdkaka has no stand-in. No baking powder, no yeast, no creamed air, no whipped foam, no folded-in butter layers.
• So it does not rise and collapse; it never goes up. With no gas bubbles there is no structure waiting to be set. The outer few centimetres dry against the tin and crack, and the middle stays batter all the way through. A finished kladdkaka standing barely 2cm tall is not underbaked — there was never anything to make it taller.
• ko.wikipedia records how that came about. The account is that in 1938, when baking powder was hard to get in Sweden, an American brownie recipe was made with the baking powder simply left out. The missing ingredient became the cake.
• Brownies are the nearest neighbour, and they argue density from something else. That page puts it all down to melted butter — "melted butter has no crystals to scrape and holds no air. This recipe melts the butter with the chocolate at step one, so there is nothing in the tin waiting to expand, and the crumb cannot open." That is an argument about air, and leavening never comes up on it at all. The two facts sit on top of each other, and this is the cake that took one of them for a name.
• And the two disagree about when to take it out. The brownie page files a wet-looking middle under something cooling fixes — "a warm brownie is that same structure with the fat still liquid. Cutting it then drags rather than slices, which reads as underbaking and is not." — and asks you to cool it completely before cutting. Kladdkaka aims at exactly the state that sentence warns you not to mistake. A skewer wet with batter is right here, and so is serving it warm. Cooled right down, the fat sets and it drifts towards a block of chocolate, which is a different sweet by then.
• Since the clock is the recipe, distrust your oven's dial. What your oven is doing covers a spread that a twelve-minute bake converts straight into the result. Twenty degrees cool leaves the centre liquid; twenty degrees hot turns this into a brownie in about three minutes. In an unfamiliar oven, open the door at twelve and look only at the edge.
• The thin shiny crust comes from the sugar. The brownie page gives the reason — "Sugar dissolved into the egg rises with the batter and dries at the surface into a thin brittle sheet; sugar still sitting as crystals cannot do it." Which is why step three beats the sugar and eggs alone for two or three minutes rather than beating the finished batter hard. Once the flour is in, more stirring will not improve that sheet.
• Basque cheesecake also runs molten, on a different principle. That one is a custard — a dairy base held by egg — and its middle flows because the egg was never taken past its setting temperature. This is a flour batter, and its middle flows because the starch never took up enough heat to gelatinise. They look alike and they are stopped at different points.
• Dusting the tin is not a habit. With no rise to pull the batter away from the sides, it simply stays wherever it touched. Without paper in the base or crumbs up the sides, this cake breaks when it comes out, not when it is cut.