This recipe for Almond Macaroon Cake is my very first Cookbook Challenge. I 
love to bake a cake so it was an easy place to start. Not wanting to give myself a free pass I have chosen a cake I have never seen before. Also because I now call Scotland my home I wanted the first recipe to have a bit of Scottish history.The recipe is from a 1968 book called The Scottish and Irish Baking Book by 
Margaret Bates. My husband bought this book in a charity shop for £3 and until today it was stood on the shelf unopened.
The Almond Macaroon Cake recipe is in the Store Cupboard Cake chapter where it recommends storing the cake for a week to 10 days before cutting. I can guarantee that a cake never lasts that long in our house. This Almond Macaroon Cake is a simple light fruit cake with a layer of macaroon baked on the top.
The first challenge is to convert the recipe to metric weights and centigrade, then to decide which flour to use as all recipes in the book simply state “flour”. So let’s get cracking!
Almond Macaroon Cake
Ingredients
For the cake:
113g stork margarine
113g caster sugar
2 eggs and 1 egg yolk
142g self raising flour
43g ground almonds
113g currants
113g sultanas
113g chopped glacé cherries – the recipe called for angelica but I couldn’t source any so glacé cherries seemed a good substitute.
For the Macaroon:
1 egg white
113g caster sugar
85g ground almonds
1 teaspoon almond essence or oil
flaked almonds to decorate
Method:
Pre-heat the oven to 160c fan and grease and line a 7 inch cake tin.
Cream the margarine and sugar together.
Beat the eggs and then add to mixture alternately with the flour and almonds.
Beat well between each addition.
Lastly add all the fruit and mix well.
Pour the mixture into the cake tin and smooth over.
Next whisk the egg white into a stiff peak and then fold in the other ingredients.
When everything is combined spread it onto the top of the cake mixture
Decorate with the flaked almonds.
Cover the cake tin with an inverted swiss-roll tin or similar baking tray and bake for 75 minutes.
After this time remove the tin and bake for another 30 minutes. Be careful when removing the tin as I pulled off some of the macaroon topping.
Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 10 minutes before removing from the tin.
Learnings:
I chose self raising flour as the cake is meant to have a Madeira style texture 
which uses self raising.
As I couldn’t source Angelica I chose to substitute it for diced glacé cherries which have worked well.. Chopped mix peel would also complement this recipe.
The original recipe gave a baking time of 2 hours which I followed and the cake is too dry. I would recommend about 15 minutes less in the first bake and then the same 30 minutes without the inverted tin. This allows the macaroon to crisp up.
It is an unusual looking cake but very tasty and well worth the effort – Almond Macaroon Cake!
