今日は or Magda's Overly Elaborate Cooking

Interior of Raspberry/Chocolate/Almond Torte

Well, we ate the first slices of the cake at lunch today - it cut very easily, and the layers of jam and chocolate had soaked into the cookies nicely, turning them into a dry-cake like texture. It was very grown-up and europeanesque. Also, the ground almonds made it REALLY filling. I think it would work well with coffee or tea (though I was just drinking seltzer water).

Disappointingly, the almond flavor was pretty much lost. If I do this again, I'll add much more almond extract and give it slightly thicker layers of filling. However, this method of layer-cake making was much less stressful than the cake I made for Aaron's birthday (also much easier to eat). So the next time I have an urge/am asked to bring a dessert someplace, I might try doing something similar with different fillings - maybe chocolate cookie layers with white chocolate and espresso creme layers, or a basic butter cookie (maybe with ground pecans!) with peach and caramel.

Raspberry-Chocolate Almond Neapolitan Torte

I started with the Neapolitan Cake recipe from Smitten Kitchen and did some things to it. Mostly, I halved the recipe and used pre-ground up almonds I had bought for something else and changed the fillings.

From the left:
1.5 c / 180 g flour
.5 c / 90 g brown sugar
1/8 tsp salt
70 g ground almonds (about 1/2 c)
1 TBS flour (I think this was supposed to come out of the other flour but I didn't take it from there).
2 egg yolks
1/4 tsp almond extract
1 stick / .5 c butter at room temperature

First, I creamed the butter, sugar and salt. I actually let the butter warm up and that really helped.

Then I added the almond/flour in.

Egg yolks, one at a time.

Then I added the flour. When it was well-mixed, it was a very sturdy dough (as you can see from the spoon jabbed in).

I weighed it and then divided it into equal pieces. Somehow, even though I thought it weighed 17 oz and divided that by 6 and made each piece 2.8 oz, I ended up with 7 2.8 oz layers. Very mysterious... I put each blob of dough between two sheets of wax paper and pressed them out into approximately 6 inch circles with a small pot. The glass lid came in handy for making sure that they were round.

After sitting in the freezer for 30 minutes I baked them at 375 for 10 minutes, which was clearly too long due to the burnt edges. I don't think they actually needed to go in the freezer.

I made a cake board with a piece of cardboard covered in wax paper.

I spread the bottom layer with a thick layer of trader joe's raspberry jam (the lower-sugar kind) because I was too lazy to make jam.

I also made a chocolate ganache (based loosely on a recipe from Baking with Julia) out of 2 oz bittersweet chocolate and 1/4 c really hot milk (pour hot milk over broken up chocolate and stir). This went on the next layer.

I jammed up the next layer and then laid it on the chocolate one. Repeat.

The last disk I put raspberry jam and then covered that with the chocolate... then I put some decorative almond slivers on the top. Now it has to sit wrapped up tightly for a day or so so that the chocolate and raspberry can soak into the cookies. I put it in the fridge to harden the chocolate before wrapping. If I was smart, I'd've wrapped and then added the top layer afterwards.. but I was on a roll with the schmearing of ingredients.