Splendida Torta Maria

Dad and wifey are going on a trip for a week and a half!
I'm going to ignore the obvious feelings of inadequacy regarding the fact that it's pretty pathetic to still live at home deep into your mid-twenties and enjoy this for what it is - a chance to pretend that this is my house and I have my life together and best of all an uninterrupted Valentines Day weekend at the end!!! This is 'Thank You' cake.
I've cooked for the Silver Spoon once already (and amazing roast beef with chesnuts, mmmmm so good) but didn't feel like writing about it, so this is inauguration proper. I'm also quite tempted to write stuff in the margins a la Elizabeth David, and to try everything in the book a la Julie Powell.
Anyway, here's the stuff, I had to go to three different supermarkets to find blanched almonds. WTF? Unblanched almonds? - yes, plentiful; ground almonds? - of course, as many as you want; toasted, slivered almonds? - why wouldn't they be there! (how do you dig my funky grammar, by the way?) I finally found these pathetic little bags stuffed into a corner behind some dates.
The reason I chose this cake is because of the relatively short ingredients list and the fact that it doesn't have any flour (also, I'm determined to use up that bag of potato flour I bought for the kissel. One teaspoon at a time if need be). I'm not coeliac but I assume that this would make for a very light cake (light in texture, try not to look at the entire stick of butter going in).
So first thing first, the short list of ingredients is a joke. Even if you ignore the enormous quantities of everything, there's no getting away from how labor intensive the process it. The almonds are toasted in a frying pan, cooled, and chopped up. The food processor has packed up so I'm doing this, rather romantically, by had. Blah blah blah, long story short, it took a really long time. I could have just found toasted, chopped almonds in the shops, I guess, but there is no getting away from whipping all the eggs individually - the whites to soft peaks, and yolks with sugar. Eventually the butter gets incorporated into the yolks, bit by tiny, agonising bit. Then melted chocolate, nuts and egg whites are mixed in, and the bastard creation goes in the oven.
Result: Urgh, look at this thing. I dusted it with icing sugar but that only accentuated the cracks. Nevermind, right? The proof of the pudding is in the eating? This 'cake' is not a cake at all, it's a house brick. Marie Antoinette might have suggested it as a building material.
The ridiculous amount of sugar doesn't cut through the bitterness of the dark chocolate, it's somehow dense, heavy and very dry at the same time, the shards of almond lie in wait to stab you in the mouth. Not good. Some four letter words are going in the margins. Bad cake. But maybe that's just me, because the next day when I had come home from work, the whole thing had been eaten!