Claire Saffitz Makes Best Crunchy Almond Cake Recipe | Dessert Person

test test almond cake crunchy almond cake breakfast sandwich coming through ready hi everyone I'm Clara saffets welcome to my home kitchen today I have a recipe that is an almond Lover's Dream It's a recipe from what's for dessert it truly is I think my favorite cake in the entire book I wanted to develop an almond cake that was this perfect kind of Goldilocks texture and flavor and this is it I'm really excited to show it to you it's super easy it's my crunchy almond cake [Music] so I I love almond flavor I love that like marzipani kind of like intensity that you get with almond desserts now my go-to almond cake recipe in the past has been it's a very famous recipe from The Chez Panisse desserts book for the almond cake but I wanted my version to be like a little less cakey less sweet like I just wanted to really fine tune the almond cake and keep it simple keep it really kind of straightforward and I'm so so happy with where it landed this is just a phenomenal cake foreign show up a lot of different places in this recipe it's called a crunchy almond cake because there's kind of a crunchy layer of sugar and almonds on top so I have sliced almonds then I have Amaretto which is an almond liqueur and I also have importantly almond paste this slightly coarse paste made from ground almonds and sugar it's not the same thing as marzipan so just keep that in mind marzipan has a lot more sugar almond paste is still very sweet but less sweet than marzipan so make sure you get says almond paste not marzipan often you'll see both side by side in the grocery store some melted butter for the pan and more butter for the cake vanilla extract some Demerara sugar that's going to help me make that crunchy layer on top four large eggs granulated sugar all-purpose flour and some salt and baking powder if you don't want to use Amaretto you can just add milk just substitute a quarter cup of milk for the quarter cup of Amaretto you're just going to use a hand mixer to put together the batter and you'll need a nine inch cake pan and that's really it foreign so I'm going to start by toasting my almonds I love this technique for creating this kind of like top layer on the cake so I have four ounces or one cup of sliced almonds these are very thin and I have them sort of spread out in a really thin layer so they toast rather quickly it's five to seven minutes and I'll give them a toss halfway through just to make sure they toast evenly because often the ones around the sides go a little faster while that's toasting I'm going to prepare my cake pan so I'm going to take some melted butter and just brush it on the bottom and anytime I'm using parchment paper I put butter underneath it to actually help the parchment stay in the bottom of the pan where I want it to it's going to go back in and butter the parchment and then the sides so I have the almonds you can see that they have just like this really nice even golden color not in every application but I'm almost always going to toast a nut before I bake with it because when it inside of a cake and nut is not going to toast it's not going to get hot enough and have the kind of like moisture loss so it's just going to build a lot of flavor and also give that crunchy topping to my crunchy almond cake I'm going to start by sprinkling a little bit of the Demerara sugar into the bottom of the cake pan so this is a quarter cup I'm just going to do like a light coating there's no real technique here you're just kind of layering the sugar and the almonds in the bottom of the pan and as long as you have pretty even coverage you're going to get a really nice crunchy layer and I'm going to kind of take a handful of the almonds scatter those in the bottom then I can scatter a little more sugar in there and what ends up happening is you get this kind of like intermingling and shingling and layering of the sugar and the almonds just turns out super delicious if you toss it all together what's going to happen is all that sugar is going to settle to the bottom and you're not going to have the kind of like layering effect because the sugar so fine cake pan is ready I'm gonna set it aside all I'm going to do is mix together the dry ingredients first my all-purpose flour it's three quarters of a cup plus two tablespoons I generally don't like to split up measurements like that it's like I either want it to be three quarters of a cup or one cup but in this case like I was wanted to be so kind of like precise and dialed in about this recipe that like that is the right amount of flour well I wouldn't choose use almond flour but I want it to have like this is already like I'm already adding ground almonds like I don't need you know what I mean I'm already adding I've got almonds from Norman paste I don't need more ground on them then to this I'm just adding my salt and then one teaspoon of baking powder it's actually relatively little flour so it's just there to kind of give the cake some structure and some bounce and everything [Music] dry ingredients and set this aside I'm going to open up my almond paste and show you what it looks like so it comes really well wrapped but it still can dry out in the package if it's been sitting around for a very long time so you want to make sure that you're using an almond paste that has it's just soft and moldable and is kind of has the texture of like modeling clay I'm just gonna grab a scissor I'm gonna grab I say a scissors but that's not right I'm gonna grab scissors some scissors a pair of scissors but how is this a pair is there two knives I'm going to grab scissors there it is pear so one of these is a scissor and now it's a pair of scissors the whole thing is one thing anyway I'm just cutting this off it's still nice and soft so this is like in a sense fresh just not old and dried up so what I'm going to do is I'm going to crumble into my mixing bowl so I like to pinch off pieces of it often you'll see almond cakes assembled in the food processor and if you have a really hard almond paste that your concern might not kind of blend into your batter I would pulse it in the food processor with the sugar and just get it really well broken up and then you can proceed but this is nice and soft so this won't have any problem kind of incorporating into the batter just using a hand mixer a stand mixer also with the paddle is more powerful so you'll probably get better blending that way but little like perceivable perceptible bits of almond paste kind of disappear during baking so it's not a concern now I'm going to add the sugar if you wanted to incorporate some other flavors here like some lemon zest or some orange zest you certainly could I would add it now and kind of work it together with the sugar but this is just all about the Almond flavor if you have any big clumps almond paste you can kind of break them up a little bit finer developing a cake recipe is all about thinking about the order of operations and the order in which you add the ingredients and so when I think about almond paste and like how am I going to incorporate that into the recipe I'm thinking about the texture and what is it going to incorporate most easily as well as like what is it made of what is it composed of it's a lot of fat and a lot of sugar so I'm adding it with the butter and the sugar so I have my hand mixer with the Beaters so you want to work this on low until everything's kind of broken up and the sugar is mostly Incorporated this bowl is not really big enough it's the biggest Glass bill I have I'll order some other ones so you can see the almond paste is incorporating but it's not like really getting broken up so I'm going to increase the speed so I put a towel underneath the bowl because it was rattling and it was moving around so this just helps to keep it fixed so you can kind of focus on the mixer okay so I want to continue to beat this and I'll stop it and scrape it on the sides until it's light and fluffy so this is that like sort of classic first cake making step where I'm just incorporating a lot of air into the butter so this will get a little bit paler and a little bit fluffier and you want to take your time on this step because this is going to help you to create a light fluffy texture to your cake scraped on the sides keep going you can see it's looking paler and it's grown in volume a bit because of the almond paste it's not going to be as light and fluffy as it would be if I was just doing butter and sugar on its own but it's pale it's definitely gained in volume so I know there's some air in there now I'm going to add my eggs so this is four eggs which for a single layer nine inch cake is quite a lot of eggs but that combination of like lots of eggs and almond paste just makes the most kind of like delicious rich moist cake and I'm going to beat them in one at a time because I want it to emulsify in smoothly to the rest of the mixture you might also find that adding that first egg it will loosen things up a little bit so it might help you smooth out any persistent lumps use a bigger bowl than this that was my last egg so now I'm going to add my vanilla extract I think it's two teaspoons you could definitely do vanilla paste I feel like the Almond is such a strong flavor that like it doesn't actually need a strong vanilla flavor that vanilla extract is just kind of there in the background so now I have my dry ingredients and my liquid ingredients which is just that Amaretto now I'm going to alternate my wet and dry but I really just want to do half the dry so mix this on low and then once the flour is almost disappeared so I'll add the liquid the reason that we alternate wet and dry in any cake recipe is because if you were to add like all of the flour you're going to make a really stiff batter and it's going to be hard to incorporate the liquid or if you were to add all the liquid you risk sort of overwhelming the like capacity of the of the butter to like emulsify and you get it kind of broken like soupy mess so I'm gonna add the rest of the flour okay so this looks great it's like super light and kind of like luscious I'm done with the mixer now I like to just give everything a thorough scrape and fold to make sure it's well Incorporated so that's it so easy really quick the only even slightly tricky part of this cake is getting the batter into your pan in such a way that you're not like disrupting the almonds on the bottom in any kind of like significant way so to do that I mean it's not it's a pretty light easily spread spreadable batter so sometimes I'll just kind of give it big dollops just like so across the pan and if you doll up those almonds underneath aren't going to go anywhere if you have a spread that's where you're gonna pick up a lot of those almonds and it might incorporate but it's just not a big deal if that happens it's still going to be crunchy so now I just want to go in and smooth everything so of course I'm using my small offset spatula the batter is so fun to spread because it's so fluffy and aerated it looks like frosting yeah so good and spreading it I'm not you know those almonds are not moving at all on the bottom so this is super easy you just want to get it in an even layer right up to the sides now this cake will Dome a little bit as it bakes it's going to be super dark golden brown across the whole Center and we'll just give it like a poke in the middle okay so 35 to 40 minutes [Music] here it is you can see it has a little bit of a dome which is totally normal it's very golden brown If This Were Like a plain yellow cake or vanilla cake this color would be overdone but for this cake it's not it's nice and springy to the touch in the center and I see some very light cracking that's also how you know it's done smells great nice and springy if I were to poke it with a cake tester which I'll do you'll see that it will come out clean but it will also come out clean kind of before it reaches this point so it's like clean but like a little bit greasy so that's done I don't want to turn this out right away because a cake this hot is really delicate and I risk compressing the surface of the cake which becomes the bottom so I wanted to release a little bit of steam and start to kind of set it's pulling away from the sides of the pan a little bit also a doneness indicator so like in 15 minutes I'll come back cut around the sides and turn it out and we can take a look at that crunchy top [Music] I'm cutting around the sides with my offset spatula and whenever I cut around a cake I really press it up against the cake pan to make sure I'm not slicing anything off I'm really getting around it so it's cool enough for me to handle if it's still really hot use like oven mitts or a towel but I'm just going to invert it should come out totally on its own and actually it came out with the parchment still in the pan which is great so there's a little bit of sugar on the parchment but overall it looks so pretty I love the textured surface I love seeing the sugar crystals kind of spread out around the almonds this looks great it smells so good beautiful golden brown color and now we're gonna let this cool but actually I baked one last night so now we can go right into tasting it I'm going to slice into it I love the kind of like super textural surface and you really see where the almonds layer with the sugar and the sugar does not dissolve it stays in Crystal form and so I know it's going to be like this really crunchy delicious layer using a serrated knife is helpful just to kind of get through that top layer and hear how it sounds because of like the intense richness it's not the kind of cake where you want to eat like a huge slice or have a very very tall slice so in the book I have arrested for slow roasted plums that would be perfect with this be like a little unsweetened cream but it produces this super clean beautiful slice and you can see that top layer of almonds and sugar um smelling it it's like I get all of that kind of like intense almond extract kind of Aroma but also toasted almond I'm just going plain because I don't think it needs anything actually I haven't had this cake in a while I'm very excited um crunch perfect moisture perfect sweetness perfect almondiness like it's not overwhelming you get all that Aroma and flavor I love the crunchy top it's just such a simple cake I really hope people make it because it looks unassuming it looks fairly plain and straightforward but it's a cake I'm really proud of because just everything I wanted to be thank you so much for watching and don't forget to like And subscribe [Music] foreign

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 230,015

Keywords: almond cake recipe, how to make almond cake, easy almond cake, cake recipe, cake, dessert, baking, how to make, almond, how to make cake, how to bake, simple cake, easy cake, tasty cake, coffee cake, almond cake, claire saffitz, claire saffitz makes, crunchy almond cake, dessert person, bon appetit, claire bon appetit, gourmet makes, nyt cooking, food52, easy almond cake recipe, claire saffitz almond cake, easy dessert, best dessert, delicious dessert, cakes, bake cake, food

Id: XHWsjdp7H7c

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023