Alice Medrich’s Almond Cake
Over the holiday weekend a friend kindly gave me a copy of Alice Medrich’s Pure Dessert. If you, like me, have never read Alice Medrich’s cookbooks, much less baked from them, please head for your nearest indie bookstore or library and acquaint yourself with Ms. Medrich’s oeuvre. Barring these options, order Ms. Medrich’s books online, avoiding, if at all possible, the commercial monolith strangling small businesses everywhere.
Berkeley freak flag lecture concluded.
We all know baking is more stringent than cooking. Rules underlie every baking recipe. Break them at your peril.
This inherent rigidity means there will always be a need, indeed, a market, for excellent instructional manuals like Pure Dessert. If Ms. Medrich had written a baking manual without recipes, she would have created a worthy book. With the recipes–elegant, sophisticated desserts offering the culinary equivalent of pearl earrings–she created an enduring work.
Consider: nibby ice cream, made with cacao nibs, buckwheat strawberry shortcakes, kamut pound cake (in 2007!!), and this almond cake, which is so ridiculously easy that even the klutziest baker–i.e., me–can manage it.
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Medrich uses a food processor to both grind the almonds and mix them into a batter for her cake. If your food processor is better natured than mine, all is well. Then again, if your processor, like mine, chokes on anything more challenging than a peeled zucchini, prepare for annoyance.
I went years without a processor before finally investing in a Cuisinart 9-cup processor. I would love to say it was a great idea and I should’ve bought one sooner. It was neither.
If machinery were animate, my processor would be a Victorian neurasthenic, inhaling liberal draughts of sal volatile from a lace-trimmed hankie. Faced with a full work bowl, it musters a few noisy, halfhearted grinds before lapsing into exhaustion, leaving the rest of the food in mushy chunks.
More often than not, I am left wondering why I bothered using it to begin with. The almond cake was no exception. Tasked with grinding almonds and sugar, the processor quailed, depositing a ring of sugar around the bottom of the work bowl.
Uttering a few choice oaths, I poured the batter from the work bowl to an analogue mixing bowl, scraped the sugar from the processor bowl, mixed in the final 1/3 cup of flour by hand, and baked the cake.
It’s been that kind of summer.
Over time I have lost my sweet tooth, preferring savory indulgences like cheese, potato chips, and the occasional tankard of bourbon. (Did I mention the ants in my kitchen pantry? a new kind of tendinitis? I could go on, but you get the picture. A tankard.) The many tarts and cakes I bake are for my husband and his caregiver. This once, while photographing the almond cake, I decided to taste a small bite.
That small bite rapidly became the entire piece, and could easily have become much more. This is a very adult almond cake, barely sweet, with a compact crumb and deep almond flavor. The ground almonds give the cake a faintly marzipan texture our English friends aptly describe as “moreish.” You have been warned.
Ms. Medrich suggests serving the almond cake with fresh fruit. I write in early July, a wonderful time for berries and stone fruits. This almond cake would also pair beautifully with a sweet dessert wine or sherry. It would also be wonderful with espresso, tea, or black coffee.
In truth, though, this cake needs absolutely nothing but your focused attention.
Almond Cake
With only one alteration, from Alice Medrich’s Pure Dessert, a book I strongly encourage you to buy immediately.
Preparation time: roughly one hour
Yield: one 8-inch/20 cm cake
Note: You will need an 8-inch/20 cm cake pan and a food processor, handheld mixer, or mini-processor to bake this cake. See notes for discussion of ways to bake this cake if you lack kitchen equipment.
If possible, weigh your ingredients.
4 ounces/116 grams whole almonds, blanched or not
1 cup plus two tablespoons/300 grams sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 large eggs, at room temperature
8 tablespoons (1 American stick) sweet butter, at room temperature, sliced into 4-5 pieces
1 generous tablespoon Amaretto (see notes, below)
1.5 ounces/45 grams AP Flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
Optional:
Powdered sugar (caster) for the top
Place oven rack in lower third of oven. Preheat the oven to 350F/180C.
Butter the sides of an 8-inch/20-cm round cake pan. Cover pan bottom with parchment paper.
Put almonds, sugar, and salt in food processor work bowl. Pulse until almonds are pulverized. Add eggs, butter, and Amaretto, if using. Pulse to blend.
At this juncture, either continue using your processor or, if your machine is struggling, pour the batter into a large mixing bowl.
Add flour and baking powder and either process until just blended or add ingredients to the large bowl and using a spatula, mix by hand until just blended.
Pour batter into cake pan and place in oven.
Bake almond cake 35-40 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. If cake begins to brown too much on top, cover lightly with tinfoil.
Cool the cake completely on rack before transferring to a plate. Ms. Medrich recommends allowing the cake to ripen a day before cutting into it.
Serve almond cake with fresh berries, stone fruit, or by itself. As noted in the post, the almond cake pairs well with sweet dessert wines, sherry, or, more traditionally, tea or coffee.
Almond cake keeps well at room temperature for about five days, should it last that long. The cake freezes, well-wrapped, up to three months.
Notes:
Almond cake is based on freshly ground almonds, ground in a full-sized food processor. Lacking a processor, you can grind whole almonds in a nut grinder, a coffee grinder or mini-food processor. Less ideally, almond cake may be baked using purchased ground almonds or almond flour. If you choose the latter options, make sure your ingredients are fresh. Nut oils are highly perishable. Trust your nose: rancid nut products will smell off.
If you do own a food processor but it’s an underpowered model, you can still make this cake. Here’s how:
–Grind the almonds in the food processor. Finish the recipe using a traditional or handheld mixer
–Just before adding flour, pour the batter into a large mixing bowl. Add the flour and mix by hand.
Note that discussing the above takes longer than assembling the cake.
The original recipe calls for 1/4 teaspoon almond extract, added with the almonds, sugar, and salt. An optional tablespoon of Kirsch is suggested, which is added to the batter with the eggs. I substituted the Amaretto for both ingredients successfully. Either way, you can’t go wrong.
The original recipe calls for blanched or unblanched almonds. I didn’t bother to blanch mine.
To blanch almonds, heat water either in the microwave or atop the stove. Drop the almonds in for thirty seconds. Drain in colander and run cool water over them. Repeat. Dry in clean, non-linting towel. The skins should come off easily.
