• Recipes
• Desserts
• Cakes
• Apple-almond cake (apfel-marzipan-kuchen)

I sourced recipes for this book from everywhere, and I mean everywhere: friends, mothers-in-law, abandoned magazines in hotels, strangers, newspapers, antique cookbooks, stained handwritten notebooks, the Internet, and even from the back of a generic brand of almond paste sold at the grocery store around the corner from my house. <br /> <br />I can explain: My assistant, Maja, and I had tried a couple of apple–almond paste cakes earlier in our testing, but they were nothing special. In fact, after the most recent lackluster one, I’d decided to omit this cake, even though I love the combination of almond paste and apples and I was sort of surprised we hadn’t cracked that particular code. Three days before the manuscript was due, Iwas looking on the back of a packet of almond paste and out of the corner of my eye I saw a little recipe. I mean really little; it was printed on the short side of the 4-inch- /10cm-wide rectangular packet. It was less than a knuckle’s length of printed information, but as soon as I saw it, I knew we’d have to try it. <br /> <br />We had almond paste. We had apples. We had an hour between one loaf rising and another cake baking. So we made a few tweaks (more apples, for one, and adding almond extract and salt for better flavor plus brushing a hot apricot glaze on top to give the cake a special sheen) and an hour later we had the world’s best apple-almond cake in front of us. No joke. This cake is epic. <br /> <br />The crumb is so incredibly tender, it’s almost creamy (don’t skip the cornstarch!), and tastes of both sweet cream and faintly boozy almonds. You can’t taste the almond paste outright, but it gives the crumb an ineffable richness. The apples add lovely little punches of juicy tartness here and there, since they’re both cubed and folded into the batter and also sliced and laid out attractively on top. Baked in a 9-inch/23cm pan, the cake is a satisfyingly full 2 inches/5cm tall. The apricot glaze gives it a gorgeous, company-ready finish. And it keeps well, if wrapped in plastic, for a couple days on the counter. So in every way, this cake was worth the wait. <br /> <br />Reprinted with permission from Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss, copyright © 2016. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

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