French Almond Cakes

We are spending our last 1 week in Singapore & cant believe that we have been living here for the last 4 years. We have enjoyed every moment here & feels sad to say goodbye to this country. The only bitter feeling that we have is our current Landlords behaviour. He has been mentally harassing us for the last 1 month asking us to pay him 4.5 months of rent as compensation for breaking the rental contract in between. Now this man has been really been a big pain & we are still sorting out on this issue. Because of this we are having a very bad taste:( Hopefully things should resolve in a couple of days. The only bad part about this place is that majority of Land lords are very bad & greedy. They try & bully the tenants. Try to extract as much as money from the tenants:( We have been very unfortunate to get one such bad Landlord. 

Well coming back to today's post, since we are moving, I have been busy with finishing off the groceries in the pantry. I figured out that I have a big packet of almonds & wanted to put these into use. We all know the good benefits of almonds & hence I made a cake out of these. I got this recipe from Happy home baking site, you can check here beautiful  site here .  I tried to tweak in the recipe a little & the results were fabulous. This cake is very moist & soft. Its like melt in your mouths type. We all loved this cake & here is the recipe.

Baking time: 45 mins

total time: 1 hours

6 inch round pan or 8 inch round pan

Ingredients:m

• 150 g butter at room temperature
• 1 cup of powdered sugar
• 3 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 90g ground almonds (almond powder) (almost a cup)
• 100 gms plain flour (almost 3/4th cup)
• 1 tspn baking powder
• 1 tablespoon milk
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (optional)
• 1/4 tspn salt

Directions:

1. Pre-heat oven at 180degC. Grease (with butter) and flour the sides of a 6 inch  pan, line the base with parchment paper, set aside.
2. Cream the butter & sugar for 2 minutes until light & fluffy. 
3. Add in the eggs into them & beat for another 1 minute.
4. Now add the almond powder, four, baking powder, vanilla essence, salt & milk. Beat with an electric mixer or whisk. When quite light and fluffy, spoon into the prepared pan and spread the batter evenly.
5. Bake at 180degC for 40-45mins, or until the sponge just springs back when pressed . (If you are using 8 inch pan then the baking time can be reduced to 30- 35 mins)
6. Run a thin bladed knife around the sides of the pan to loosen the cake, then turn out onto a wire rack and let cool. 

How to powder almonds: Just put the whole almonds in the mixer or blender & blend it to a fine powder. I did mine with the skin on.