I was wondering if you had a recipe for "flourless" chocolate cake, and is that also the same as a "torte?" I would prefer one with not so many eggs — maybe 4 to 5 or so.

 A torte is a cake made with ground nuts or breadcrumbs instead of flour, although many restaurants and cookbooks have broadened the term so that it can be used to refer to just about any cake these days (too often, sadly, a cake that looks fancy but tastes like cardboard). A quick glance through the dozens of torte recipes at various sites online shows at least as many with flour as with nuts or breadcrumbs.

Flourless cakes in the American tradition (many of which include two or three tablespoons of flour) may or may not have the nuts or breadcrumbs, and are primarily held together by eggs, which set up as the cake cooks. Consequently they tend to have a lot of eggs. If you cut back on the eggs, something else is needed to maintain the structure. For instance, the Chocolate Delirium Torte has no flour, breadcrumbs, or nuts, only chocolate, butter, and 6 eggs.

Of the flourless chocolate cake recipes we looked at online, most use lots and lots of eggs. The one you might like best is the economically named Flourless Chocolate Cake, which includes five eggs. Another option — although we can't vouch for it — is a Low-Fat, Flourless, Chocolate Truffle Cake, which uses only egg whites instead of whole eggs.

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