Giada De Laurentiis has built a culinary and entertainment career around her passion for Italian cuisine, sharing a mix of traditional recipes and those with her own personal spin. With so many dishes under her belt, it has left people wondering if she has favorites. Last year, De Laurentiis revealed how she’d curate the ideal Italian birthday dinner for herself. Full of bright, zesty flavors, her menu included dishes such as lemon spaghetti and pork Milanese, and she went with a must-try Italian cake: torta Caprese.
“One of my favorite desserts ever is a torta Caprese,” wrote De Laurentiis on her GIADZY blog. “It’s a quintessential flourless cake (made with almond flour — so it’s gluten free!) from the island of Capri, made traditionally with bittersweet or dark chocolate.”
While not as famous as tiramisu or pandoro, torta Caprese is a classic Italian dessert, characterized by its bittersweet flavor and rich texture. It’s a dessert fit for a chef, and De Laurentiis added her own spin to the dish by shifting much of the flavor profile. Rather than a heavy, dark chocolate dessert, she made an original lemon torta Caprese.
What makes Giada De Laurentiis’s torta Caprese special
Giada De Laurentiis’s lemon torta Caprese is different from what you’d typically expect of the dessert, but it requires just as much finesse to master. Rather than leaning into dark chocolate, her version of the recipe incorporates white chocolate, and it’s much sweeter because it doesn’t contain bitter cocoa solids. Since white chocolate is made from cocoa butter instead of pure cacao, it melts and burns more quickly than dark chocolate. It takes careful timing to achieve the perfect consistency using the double-boiler method, which is how De Laurentiis melts the white chocolate for her torta.
De Laurentiis’s torta Caprese doesn’t contain wheat flour or leavening like baking powder or baking soda, which often serve as textural support to a cake’s integrity. On top of this, she adds an acidic component with lemon juice, which can further deflate a cake. To work around these stops, her recipe includes five eggs for a 9-inch pan, and they do a lot of heavy lifting to give the cake its rise. The egg whites are whipped in a separate bowl with salt to form foamy peaks that trap air, which is then reincorporated into the whole batter to give the torta Caprese its beautiful, fluffy consistency when baked. The lemon torta Caprese fits right in with De Laurentiis’s style, featuring a clever mixing of ingredients and creative use of lemon, and it’s a memorable twist on a classic.
