Happy Sunday! Spring has sprung here, so I present to you a lovely, light cake option, 16-6: Tosca Cake. They even used tulips in the picture!
Tosca cake (or toscakaka) is a well-known thing, essentially a Swedish almond cake. There’s a million other recipes out there for it, but we’re here to talk about this one, so let’s do that.
Lots of brunch occasions in the springtime…this could be a great dish to bring with you or to serve at your own table if you have any upcoming plans. You can even play with flavor extracts if you want to give it that extra something.
You probably already have most of this in your house–almonds might be the only thing you have to pick up.
The TIPS mention you can flavor the batter with vanilla–I think you could use other types of flavors as well. How about maple? I think that could be good here (even though this is supposed to be Swedish/Scandinavian). Fusion cuisine is all the rage these days, so let’s find out…
Ingredients. I had some maple extract and sliced almonds lying around (along with the rest of this), so this wasn’t even a dent in the weekly grocery list. I even have too much butter pictured here–2 full sticks would cover what you need.
Easiest way to cream butter and sugar is with a stand mixer and balloon whisk attachment. Floured/greased cake pan can be seen in the background.
Don’t forget to preheat your oven!
Butter melter hasn’t gotten a lot of use lately, but today it finally has a job to do.
After creaming the butter and sugar (and maple extract), I changed out attachments to the paddle with spatula edge and added in the flour. I mixed this in VERY slowly so it didn’t come back in my face.
In the meantime. I have the melted butter off the stove and chilling in the freezer for just a few minutes.
With the mixer running at a low speed, I slowly poured the cooled (but still melted) butter into the cake mix, stopping JUST as soon as it’s all in there and mixed together. If you overmix it, the cake won’t be as fluffy when it bakes.
Poured the batter into the pan and gave it a few taps to even it out. There’s probably still a bubble or two in there, but it’ll be okay.
While that bakes, I’ll work on the glaze. I added some maple extract here too, just to make sure to really drive home the maple essence.
Time to mix in the almonds. These are supposed to be peeled, but the skins don’t bother me. Plus, they’re pre-sliced, so less work for me.
Cake’s done baking, looks okay so far.
Starting to spread on the maple/almond glaze. I find it easiest to put it in the middle and then push it out towards the edges.
It makes just enough glaze to cover the cake–when spreading it, make sure to really get in the edges and where it pulls away from the pan. When it bakes, it’ll get nice and crunchy.
Oven shot to show you the bubbly glaze, but don’t look at how dirty my oven is. I recently got a pizza stone, so we’ve been experimenting with things getting hotter/messier than normal.
I pulled it after the suggested time, but this seemed…not done enough to me. I flipped the oven back on, this time WITH the convection on, and let it go for another 5 -7 minutes. Here’s how it looked the second time…
…much better. That’s what we want, nice and toffee-like on top. At this point, I walked away and let it cool down completely before attempting to extract or slice it.
After a few hours, I came back and popped it right out with the butter knife (shown left), then cut it up with the chef’s knife (shown right) into 12 pieces. A serrated knife probably would have been better, but I did okay with it.
I know it says 8 servings, but I need those calorie counts a bit lower, so 12 pieces (at 244 each) is easier to fit in than 8 at a much higher number. I’ll just wrap and freeze the rest and we can eat them later on, like 15-46: Mousse Casablanca–we’re not even halfway done with those.
After slicing–looks like a cross between pound cake and coffee cake, with a crunchy almond toffee topping instead of crumb/streusel.
I wrapped up all 12, and kept the two biggest ones (shown right) out for dessert that night. It never tastes as good as it does fresh.
Here’s how I froze the rest, in my chest freezer (the thing with all the stickers on it) on a quarter-sheet pan. After they freeze solid, I’ll throw them in a Ziploc bag for easy storage/extraction.
The slices we kept out were EXCELLENT–I’m excited for the rest. I’m hesitant to add yet another recipe to the “Favorites” list so soon after adding 14-1: Chocolate Fondue to it just a few days prior, but it really is good, and very easy! Highly recommended.
Grade: A+
