I have a favourite cake. It is not the traditional birthday cake of my people, with the whipped cream and fluffy bits and the vanilla filling - although I like that too.

No, this is a heavy duty chocolate cake. It’s not actually all that epicurially fancy, although in my mind it’s a very special sort of cake. My parents would occasionally make it when I was growing up, and I have long yearned to make it myself.

The recipe was published in some Swedish magazine way back when, and my mother cut it out and collected it. I seem to have salvaged the recipe in late ‘99 and typed it into a text file that’s still sitting there in my home directory.

I think the time has come to A) translate and publish it for the sake of the common good, and B) actually make it myself.

Today is A) day. Please forgive the metric measurements. Work it out.

The bits that aren’t chocolate:

• 500g almond paste (you can get this in decent super markets)
• 4 egg whites (yolks used below; swedes are practical)

Grate the almond paste and mix it with lightly beaten egg whites, then spread the resulting batter into three thin layers, 20 cm in diameter, on greased cookie sheets. Bake these for 15-20 minutes at 175C, until they’re golden in colour. No, there is no explicit sugar added to the batter: the almond paste is already very sweet.

That what is:

• 4 egg yolks (you saved them, right?)
• 1 dl sugar
• 1 dl heavy cream
• 1.5 tbsp instant coffee (i’m sure strongly brewed black coffee would work fine too)
• 100g semi-sweet chocolate for baking
• 150g butter

Stir the yolks, sugar and cream in a heavy sauce pan; heat to a slow boil and stir continuously until everything’s nice and thick and goopy. Take the pan off the heat, stir in the coffee, and finally add the chocolate in, melting it. Stir occasionally and put away to cool.

Finally, simply interleave the almond layers and the chocolate sauce, finally covering the whole thing in chocolate. Make lovely patterns with a fork on top and decorate with scalded, roasted almonds (these days this just means buy roasted almond halves or slivers in the supermarket).

This cake keeps very well. It only gets better as the days go by. Make it and slowly nibble away at it over the course of a week. Find your house mates hovering around the fridge at 1 AM because they want a tiny slice before they finally sleep. Mmm.