A few months ago, I made two Simply Delicious almond cakes for work: this one, 16-26: Elegant Almond Cake and 16-33: Crispy Almond Cake. I think this one came out prettier, but they were both delicious.
Simply Delicious doesn’t mention this in their blurb, but it’s also great for accompanying coffee or tea on a Wednesday morning at the office. They also refer to this dish as a cake, but it’s very clearly a tart. To confirm, here’s a recipe from King Arthur Flour that is essentially this exact same dish (referred to a tart) but with raspberries instead of Maraschino cherries.
If you don’t have or don’t want to use Maraschino cherries, you could use real ones (canned, frozen, or probably even fresh) instead. Cherry liqueur might be difficult to locate, but I found my bottle at a BevMo.
Ingredients. Don’t buy Maraschino cherries from Costco unless you plan on making a lot of Shirley Temples. That tall bottle in the middle is the cherry liqueur–I went with Luxardo, which is Maraschino cherry liqueur.
Tossing dough ingredients into the food processor.
Getting crumbly. Notice I used the smaller, duller dough blade since that’s what I’m making with it.
It’s a ball of dough!
And now it’s a ball of dough covered in foil. This will sit in my fridge while I work on the filling.
Chopping the almond paste up into 8 pieces helps me figure out 5 oz without the scale. The package is 8 oz, so 5 pieces = approximately 5 oz. The rest becomes snacks–it’s essentially marzipan.
I decided to make each recipe into 3 smaller tart-sized cakes–it’ll make much better bite-sized pieces once I cut them up to share.
I pressed the chilled dough into the springform tart pans after mixing up the filling in the food processor.
Filling looks pretty liquidy, but it will firm up as it cooks.
Filled each as evenly as I could (since I’m splitting it up).
After baking. Each got nicely browned on top, and they’ll sink back down a bit from their currently rounded state as they cool.
After these and 16-33: Crispy Almond Cakes cooled and I popped them out of their tart pans. So far, everything looks good.
The crispy ones are pretty much done, but these still need to be glazed and garnished.
Mixed up the glaze in a bowl–you don’t really need much.
It pooled strangely, but it’ll dry clear. I’m sorry for the NSFW appearance of this picture.
I cut 4 cherries in half and placed 8 halves equally around on each cake. Once they’re cooled and transported, I’ll cut them up so each slice has a cherry on top.
Since I did 3 small cakes, that gives me 24 pieces for each cake–the perfect amount to share with my team at work.
After cooling. It’s tough to see the glaze at this angle–I wonder how their pictured ones looked so white on top.
Chipped that one there a bit–oh well, nothing’s perfect. These will be wrapped tightly in plastic wrap and transported to work. I’ll cut them up there to keep them as fresh as possible.
How I presented them at work next to the coffee maker. They were all gone by lunchtime–I’d say both were a big hit, but these definitely sold out first.
Grade: A
