Almond Meringue Cake

In between coats of shellac, I decided to try a fancy dessert for some New Year's festivities last night. I saw this recipe on French Food At Home a while back and thought I'd give it a whirl. I've never had much luck with either meringues or with candy making, and this recipe involved both...so it was a bit of a risk.

This is how it's supposed to look:



I started by chopping up the almonds. It calls for ground almonds, which I didn't have, so I chopped them by hand. After 20 minutes of chopping, I kind of entered into a Zen-like state and became fixated on making big beige bits turn into small beige bits. It was a bit unnerving once I snapped out of it. If you're planning on making this, I don't recommend chopping them yourself unless you missed your meditation class and need to zone out.

Anyways, I combined that with some sugar and cornstarch to fold in later.



I used Betty, the handy dandy Kitchen Aid, to whip up the egg whites and sugar to make a meringue. This is the part I always screw up by beating them too long until they break down into a gooey, watery mess. Thankfully, it went better today.




Then I folded in the almond mixture. This is the other part I always screw up, this time by adding the other crap too fast and deflating the whites. But, Lady Luck was with me and it worked out.



I traced out some circles on parchment and spread out the meringues. The recipe calls for using a piping bag, but I don't have one and am too lazy to make one, so I used a spoon.

In the oven it went, set at 275 F. Took a good 1.5 hours to crisp up. I checked it after 45 minutes and left a big thumbprint in one of them. Oops.



On to the buttercream. Now here's ANOTHER part I always screw up. I had to heat the sugar to 239 F exactly. I always, always burn sugar if I'm making candy or something- so much so that I'd pretty much given up trying. But Santa brought me a new thermometer and I think it made the difference.


Next came pouring the lava-hot syrup into egg yolks while Betty was whirring away at high speed. Oh and taking a picture of it at the same time. And dodging the searing little bits of caramelized sugar flying out. My recommendation: don't try photography while you're at this!

Once that whipped up and got cool, it got a good dose of nice soft butter and was whipped some more until it looked like this:



I had to try some, right? I'd never had buttercream before. Let me tell you, it was a revelation! Like, why is this not offered as a standard condiment in restaurants? Why do we not keep jars of this stuff in the fridge to smear on toast? Do you know how good this is? Do you? I feel like I need to spread the gospel of buttercream.

This is a dangerous development for me. Not to mention it was a challenge to get my tongue around each of the wires on the beater when all was said and done.

Anyways, I got so excited about this that I didn't make the connection between butter and heat. In that, if you spread frosting (whose main ingredient is butter) on a hot meringue, it would melt. See:


Don't do that. It makes you panicky. I had to shove the whole thing in the freezer before it all melted off.

After that crisis was averted, I finished layering the cake with buttercream and fruit. The recipe called for peaches, but the store didn't have any. So I settled on blueberries and some canned peaches. Here's the final product:




I have to say it turned out pretty tasty. It doesn't look anything like the cake in the show, but who cares? Rustic is in, right?

Next time, I'd try different fruits like raspberries or or poached pears maybe. It was a bit time consuming to make, but totally worth the effort. If you want to try it, you can get the recipe here. Let me know how it goes.