Home › Desserts-Puddings › Almond Torte (Spread into two deep layer)
Almond Torte (Spread into two deep layer)
1/2 C butter 3/4 C sugar 1 1/2 C flour Yolks 4 eggs Spread into two deep layer tins. 8 T milk 1½ t baking powder 1 t almond extract Little salt Beat whites of the four eggs, add 13. C powdered sugar, a litle baking powder, and spread this over batter, and sprinkle with 1/3 lb. chopped almonds. Bake in hot oven 20 to 25 minutes.
Custard to be Spread Between Layers: 1 egg 1 C milk 1 T sugar 1 T cornstarch Little vanilla Mary E. Kern.
This is a Blitz Torte — meringue baked directly onto cake batter — but the entry as printed has lost most of its first paragraph. Read the notes before shopping.
- The ingredient list is incompleteWhat survives is 8 tablespoons milk, baking powder, almond extract and salt, plus four egg yolks implied by the whites called for later. The flour, butter and granulated sugar for the batter are missing entirely; a standard Blitz Torte batter runs about 1/2 cup butter, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, four yolks and the milk given here. Treat the printed text as a fragment rather than a working formula.
- "13. C powdered sugar"A typesetting casualty. Meringue for four whites normally takes 3/4 to 1 cup sugar; 1 1/3 cups would also work and gives a crisper, sweeter crust. The original figure cannot be recovered with confidence.
- Powdered sugar in the meringueModern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, though whether the sugar used here did is not recoverable from the text. Either way it dissolves quickly; powdered sugar is what the recipe calls for and is not a fault.
- Baking powder in the whitesThe "litle baking powder" beaten into the meringue reads as deliberate rather than a misprint; a pinch, perhaps 1/4 teaspoon, is the likely intent. What it contributes to the topping is inference, not something the recipe explains.
- Hot ovenAround 400-425F. At that heat the meringue and almonds will color well before 25 minutes; if the top is browning fast, drop to 350F and finish by feel. The layers are done when the cake beneath springs back at the edge.
- Deep layer tinsTwo 8- or 9-inch round pans, at least 1 1/2 inches deep. The meringue puffs, so leave headroom and grease the sides well — meringue sticks where batter would not.
- The custard1 egg, 1 cup milk, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 tablespoon cornstarch and vanilla, cooked over low heat or a water bath until it thickens and just reaches a bare simmer, then cooled completely. It must be cold and set before it goes between the layers or it will soak the cake.
- Assembly and yieldStack the layers meringue side up, custard in the middle only — nothing goes on top but the almond crust. Serves eight to ten, and it is best the day it is made; the meringue softens overnight.
Blitz Torte -- "lightning cake" -- is a German and Austrian household cake, and versions of it appear widely in American community cookbooks under names such as Almond Torte or Meringue Torte. The trick that defines it is spreading raw meringue over raw batter so both bake at once, producing a crisp almond-studded crust without a separate frosting step; the name is generally taken to refer to that speed. Compilations of this kind were printed cheaply from contributors' handwritten cards, and the mangled ingredient line here is characteristic of the genre.