Yuletide's Secret Ingredient
It might not look pretty from the outside, but I can promise you that it is a thing of great beauty on the inside: housemade almond paste from my favorite Middle Eastern grocer, Oriental Pastry & Grocery on Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue. This stuff is potent. Honey-colored, delicately sweet and profoundly nutty, it is the ingredient that puts my Almond Buttercream over the edge.
The purpose for said buttercream? A Christmas cake of course! I've been invited to my friends John and Elisabeth's home for a Yuletide celebration and I volunteered to bring dessert. So, all morning I've been hard at work whipping up a Dark Chocolate-Almond Layer Cake.
Guess it looks like I'll be bypassing Chinatown this holiday. That said, I don't think I'll be feeling blue for the lack of Lo Mein. The spread at John and Elisabeth's is sure to be a humdinger. John is professional chef who used to work at Le Bernardin. I can only hope that my dessert lives up to the rest of the meal...Enough false modesty! I might not have worked at Le Bernardin, but I know this cake is a full-on, dark cocoa, Amaretto-accented winner.
For those of you still at home wondering what to make for dessert, here's a link to the baseline Chocolate Cake and Chocolate Ganache recipes I used. Ultimately, I filled the cake's center with the aforementioned Almond Buttercream and bedecked the sides with toasted almonds. And here's my recipe for Almond Buttercream. You can most certainly use almond paste from your neighborhood supermarket, but I must say, if you can swing by Oriental Pastry & Grocery for their exceptionally intense, made-from-scratch version, it's worth the trip!
Almond Buttercream
2 sticks unsalted butter (softened)
2/3 cup confectioner's sugar
1/4 cup milk
1 1/2 tsp. almond extract
2 TBSP. Amaretto
3 TBSP. almond paste
3/4 tsp. salt
zest of half an orange
Cream butter. Mixing on high speed, add sugar a little at a time, alternately adding milk. Cream well. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix thoroughly.
Makes enough for filling one cake. Triple recipe, if you plan to use as the main frosting for a layer cake. But do heed my warning: It's powerful stuff and could easily overwhelm, if not used in moderation.