My Grandma is awesome. So I wanted to bake her an awesome cake. She loves apricots, and what goes better with apricots than almond?
This was certainly my most ambitious cake to date. I made everything from scratch and it took all day. I had to start early with the apricot filling, made by soaking dried apricots in water for two hours and then simmering and pureeing. Whew. And, of course, I made a double batch. I must have run out of frosting/filling in a former life with dire consequences as I am overly anxious about running out. Anyways, I made four 9 inch almond cakes. Trimmed their tops (a mystery I’d wondered about for years: how do they get those cakes so even? They cut them. I’ve started doing that to my cupcakes too), and layered everything together, remembering to not put the filling all the way to the edge so it doesn’t squee out when all the layers are on.
America’s Test Kitchen is one of my favorite shows. I was watching them put together a strawberry shortbread layered cake when they gave some great tips on cutting the cakes for layering. She scored the outside of the cake where she wanted to cut. That way when she made the cut into the cake center, the scoring helps guide the blade so you get a nice even layer. Then she slid a cake round in between the layers so the newly cut top layer was on its own round. This, by the way, works so much better than what I’d been doing before (don’t ask).
Four layers and a healthy amount of vanilla buttercream later, it turned out to be rather heavier than I expected. I was glad I passed on the cake round (that cardboard circle) and started building right on my cake carrier. But it was beautiful. Grandma likes the color peach, so I added some accents. I love how the trim turned out, all swirly. I saw some cakes like that at Target once and thought it looked a little more fancy than the standard straight ones (see the carrot cake).
Since this recipe was from the ground up, I needed almond paste (but not all almond cakes call for this seemingly required ingredient. I found one with corn meal and almond extract. Ew). All the recipes I found online warned against the evils of using the canned almond paste and recommended the stuff in tubes. After scouring Minneapolis and various suburbs at upper scale grocery stores, I finally found the tube kind. And it sucked. It was dry and didn’t crumble into a nice powder like it was supposed to. As a last result, I ran to Cub and got some canned stuff. Fabulous. It was moist and was a nice powder after ten seconds of food processor-ing (after ten minutes of the tubed, I gave up). So yes, the canned stuff I will certainly use again.
Oh, and in the spirit of trying new things, this was my first cake with marzipan. I had always avoided marzipan like the plague, along with fondant, although I’m not really sure why. I made little marzipan leaves and apricots. My mom enjoys telling people that I ended up putting stems on the apricots because they looked a little too much like butts. Which is a little true. It’s mostly because I wasn’t able to color the marzipan. I found the marzipan dried like homemade play-doh. Dry and a little crumbly. The leaves did, anyways. The apricots fared a little better. Some are a little darker because I was experimenting coloring the marzipan with spices like nutmeg and cinnamon. They just ended up looking dirty.
Those look gooood.
Marzipan doesn’t color? What about almond paste–does that color and is it different from marzipan?
Marzipan is more or less almond paste mixed with powdered sugar. It does color, but all I had at the time were liquid food colors and I didn’t want to risk wrecking the stuff by adding more liquid. I use gel food coloring now.