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.