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Small Neapolitan Cakes
Pound to a fine paste in a mortar two ounces peeled almonds with two ounces fine sugar. Sift three ounces flour on a corner of the table, make a small fountain in the centre, place the almond paste in the fountain, break in one whole egg with a half saltspoon of salt, briskly knead the whole together with the hand for one minute, then place it in a cool place and let rest for thirty minutes.
Divide the preparation into six equal parts, three-quarters of an inch thick and three inches in diameter; then with the thumb gently press down in the centre of each piece to make a small hollow one and a half inches in diameter and half an inch deep. Place them in a lightly buttered and floured pastry pan, and set in the oven to bake for ten minutes. Remove, let cool off, fill the centre of the cakes with whipped vanilla cream, and serve.
A stiff almond-and-egg dough, hollowed like a tartlet shell and filled after baking. The original gives no oven temperature and a suspiciously short bake, so both need judgment.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Treat this as a moderate oven, 350F, and expect 12 to 15 minutes rather than 10 — the discs are three-quarters of an inch thick and need to dry through to the centre without browning past pale gold.
- Almond paste without a mortarTwo ounces blanched almonds with two ounces sugar goes to a fine paste in a food processor in under a minute. Pulse rather than run it, and keep the sugar in from the start; it absorbs the oil and stops the almonds turning to butter.
- Peeled almondsThat means blanched — dropped in boiling water for a minute and slipped out of their skins. Store-bought blanched almonds will do. Almond flour can stand in, though it behaves differently from almonds pounded to a paste, so add the egg cautiously and judge the dough.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is a scant eighth — a pinch. Not worth agonising over in a sweet dough.
- Weights, not cupsTwo ounces almonds, two ounces sugar, three ounces flour, one egg. This is a ratio recipe and it only behaves if you weigh it; three ounces of flour is about two-thirds of a cup, but the cup measure varies enough to matter here.
- The hollow will close upThe single instruction that decides the result. Egg-rich dough puffs, and a thumb-pressed dip half an inch deep will largely fill in. Press it deeper than looks right, and if the wells rise in the oven, press them down again with the back of a spoon in the first two or three minutes while the dough is still soft.
- Resting is not optionalThirty minutes cold lets the gluten relax and the almond oil firm up. Skipped, the discs spread and the walls of the hollow slump outward.
- Whipped vanilla creamHeavy cream whipped with sugar and vanilla — this is not pastry cream. Fill only at the moment of serving; the shells go soft within an hour of contact.
- YieldSix cakes, three inches across, one apiece. The recipe doubles cleanly.
Southern Italy has worked ground almonds and sugar into pasta reale and pasta di mandorle for centuries, a tradition generally traced to Arab sugar and almond confectionery in Sicily and carried north through the convent kitchens of the mainland. What distinguishes this version is that the almond paste is kneaded into flour and egg rather than used alone, producing a short biscuit-pastry shell instead of marzipan — a hybrid closer to a tartlet than to a sweetmeat.