Apple Marzipan Cake
Apple marzipan cake came about because as everyone else began cooing over farmers market fraises de boise and posting nauseating recipes for rhubarb bowls (go ahead, tell me you haven’t seen some gross stuff out there), I faced a fridge brimming with apples.
In the hunt for something interesting to bake, I lit on Apfel-Marzipan Kuchen, or Apple-Almond Cake, in Luisa Weiss’s Classic German Baking. Why do I call it Apple Marzipan Cake? Well, technically, there aren’t actual almonds in there. But this is silly of me. I mean, the chicken or the egg? (or, for that matter, the lemon?)
Weiss found this recipe on the side of an almond paste box three days before her manuscript was due. The cake was so good she included it anyway. And it is truly that good. I’m not the world’s biggest cake eater. My dental woes mean apples are to be admired rather than eaten. But in the interests of bloggerly accuracy, I decided to taste a small slice.
That small slice turned into two wolfed pieces before I got a grip on myself. The apples soften during baking, their sugars caramelizing into a crust that shatters as you bite down. Cornstarch adds interest to the crumb, while the marzipan adds its almond backnote. There batter has just enough sugar to sweeten the apples without smothering them.
If you still aren’t sold on this cake’s charms, know that I stupidly added the sugar to the flour instead of adding it into the almond paste/egg mixture during mixing, which would have allowed the batter to trap lots of air and create a lofty crumb. Compounding matters, the power flickered three times during baking. This cake had every excuse to be heavy and damp. Yet neither poor mixing technique nor uneven heating harmed it: this Apple Marzipan Cake emerged light, lovely, and alarmingly delicious. It’s a good keeper, too, willingly sitting on your counter for about four days. It also freezes beautifully, meaning you can slice it into wedges and freeze it in portions, sending it to work with people (read: husbands) who refuse to eat breakfast unless they are offered fresh baked goods.
Apple Marzipan Cake
From Luisa Weiss’s Classic German Baking
Yield: one 9-inch cake
Six small apples: about 1 3/4 pounds or 800 grams
Juice of 1-2 lemons
7 ounces/200 grams almond paste (one tube, not marzipan)
1/4 teaspoon salt
14 tablespoons/200 grams unsalted butter, melted and cooled
butter for greasing springform pan
3/4 cup/150 g sugar
1 teaspoon almond extract
4 large eggs at room temperature
1 1/4 level cups all-purpose flour, minus one tablespoon/150 grams flour
9 1/2 tablespoons/85 grams cornstarch
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 cup/75g strawberry or apricot jam (see notes)
Preheat the oven 350F/180C
Line the bottom of a 9inch/23cm springform with parchment paper. Butter the sides. Set the pan on a baking sheet to protect against leakage.
Slice the lemons and have them to hand.
The first set of three apples top the cake. Peel, halve, and core them. Now slice each half into six neat slices, or as neatly as you can. Place in a medium bowl and spritz with lemon to avoid discoloring.
The second set of three apples go into the cake itself and are diced. Peel, halve, and core these, then dice into 1/3 inch/8mm squares, or as near to as you can. Place these in a second medium bowl, and spritz with remaining lemon.
Melt butter and set aside to cool.
While butter cools, either grate or break up the almond paste into tiny bits. Place in mixer bowl. Fit with beater attachment and mix with salt. Add cooled butter. Mix until blended, about 2 minutes. Add sugar and almond extract and beat to blend.
Add eggs, one at a time, allowing at least 30 second between each addition.
In a 4 quart/4L bowl, sift or whisk together the flour, cornstarch, and baking powder. Gently fold dry ingredients into the batter with the large metal spoon. Fold the diced apples into the batter.
Scrape the batter into the pan. Arrange the sliced apples on top, pushing them down gently. You don’t want to submerge them.
Place the baking sheet/pan in the oven and bake the cake for about one hour and ten minutes; my cake took a bit longer. Cake is done when a tester in the middle comes out clean–be sure you aren’t hitting apples–and the top is browned and pulling away from sides of the pan. The cake will look and smell done; trust your nose and instincts.
Remove from oven and allow to cool. While cake is still warm, heat jam in a small pot until bubbling (don’t let it burn!). Pour or brush over the cake.
Once cake is cool, unclip sides.
Apple Marzipan Cake keeps well, covered, at room temperature up to four days. After that, if any is left, either refrigerate or freeze, well-wrapped, and heat before eating.
Notes:
I always set springform pans on baking sheets lest they leak batter: better to clean up a baking sheet than an oven floor.
The original recipe calls for apricot jam. I used home-made strawberry, and it worked beautifully. If you want to make strawberry jam, follow the cherry recipe in above link, but baking strawberries for 90 minutes instead of two hours. The rest of recipe is same.
Marzipan and almond paste are not the same item. You want almond paste, which is made from pure ground almonds and most often sold in 7-ounce tubes, though some markets sell it fresh in tubs.
Normally I close with a photo of an appropriately crumbed empty dish or the like, but none of those pictures were good. So I give you an off topic but more interesting shot, courtesy of my new toy, a Canon G9 X. This camera is scarcely bigger than a cell phone but takes better photographs than my admittedly aging Nikon DSLR (sob). Below, a mural in San Francisco’s City Center.
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