Almond Crusted Buttercake

The Home Bakers  event hosted by Joyce from Kitchen Flavours is doing almond-crusted butter cake from “Coffee Cakes” by Lou Seibert Pappas – a firm and dense traditional butter cake coated with almonds. As it does not have any baking powder, it is not quite the fluffy as butter cakes usually are. While I am not entirely fond of cake texture (although many other THB members really like it! I think its because I am not a butter cake fan), I really do love the crunchy almond coating. Eileen of Hundred and Eighty Degrees suggested adding 3 tablespoons of buttermilk to my 6 cupcake recipe below, and I think this will really produce a lovely, moist cake.

I am glad that I made an effort to carefully coat the sides and bottom of the cupcake pan with lots of almonds and then topped the cupcakes with more. The almonds give a crunchy bite to the cake and really enhances the basic butter cake. In fact, I doubled the amount of almonds that was specified in the recipe.

The original recipe calls for it to be made in a bundt pan. I don’t have one of those, besides I did not want to make such a huge cake as my hubby does not eat butter cakes (for health reasons) and my kids may not like almonds. I only used one-third of the recipe amount and made them into little cupcakes which were easier to eat and I thought would have a larger surface area for more almonds!

To ensure that the almonds coat the sides of the cake, you’ll need to butter your pan very well and make an effort to carefully arrange the almonds onto the sides of the pan. I was wondering if the almonds would stick, but they did onto the side of my metal muffin pan. The batter of the cake is thick and holds the almonds to the sides of the pan when it is poured in.

The amount of ingredients for 6 cupcakes are below, in case anyone wants to make a small portion, as it takes a long time to calculate and convert the amounts. For the full recipe and method, please see Emily of Makan Foray’s blogpost.

Almond-crusted butter cake (6 cupcakes)

Ingredients

• 1/3 cup almonds (this is twice what was required, and I used the extras to top my cupcakes – lovely!)
• 113 g butter
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 tsp vanilla
• A pinch of salt
• 3/4 cup icing sugar (I reduced to 1/2 cup)
• 86 g cake flour
• 3 tbsp buttermilk* (3 tbsp fresh milk + 2tsp lemon juice left to stand for 5-10 minutes) – suggested by Eileen