Frangipani - Marzipan cake - Mazarin cake

Frangipani - Marzipan cake - Mazarin cake © kvalifood.com

A Danish cake classic. Heavy and spongy. Once again a variation on a pound cake. It’s actually just a sponge cake with marzipan. But once again, it is a variation that is worth the effort.

Ingredients

dry

  • 100 g (3.5 oz) wheat flour (corn flour for gluten free version)
  • 100 g (3.5 oz) potato flour (or cornstarch)
  • 200 g (7 oz) grated marzipan
  • 1 tbsp baking powder

wet

  • 200 g (7 oz) icing sugar
  • 200 g (7 oz) butter, melted
  • 4 eggs

ganache / glaze

  • 50 g (2 oz) dark chocolate, 70%
  • 50 g (2 oz) milk chocolate
  • 1 dl (½ cup) cream

Directions #1 - manual method

(Makes a heavier and more spongy cake. The cake in the picture above is made by this method.)

Grate the marzipan as fine as you like.

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl.

Mix the wet ingredients in another bowl.

Mix everything together in one of the bowls.

Pour the batter into a greased spring form.

Directions #2 - food processor

(Makes a lighter and more airy cake… And less washing up.)

Mix all the wet ingredients together in food processor. Break up the marzipan into small pieces and put that in too. You do not need to melt the butter.

Blend it into a creamy batter. It might look like it is separated. That is ok.

Mix the dry ingredients and only blend until all the flour is blended in.

Baking

Bake for 40 minutes at 180°C (355°F) in a greased spring form.

It is done when no unbaked dough sticks to a meat pin or knitting needle.

A small spring form makes a high and thick cake, and a large spring form makes a low and thin cake. A thick cake takes a lot longer to bake than a thin cake, so I have sometimes experienced that it takes up to an hour in a smaller spring form.

Let it cool for at least 20 minutes before you put on the ganache.

Ganache

Melt the chocolate in the cream in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, at a low temperature.

Notes

If you want a large cake, you can bake it in large roasting pan instead of spring form. You just multiply the ingredients by 2½, so for example, you get 500 g (1 lbs) of sugar.

However, you can simply multiplying ganache with 2 times. There will be enough anyway.

The reason to use half potato starch and half wheat flour, is to make the cake more porous. It’s the gluten/protein content of the flour that makes it a chewy dough, and results in air bubbles in the dough. Then when you mix in the pure starch from potato flour, it is equivalent to using flour with a low protein content.

The cake does not care if you use potato starch or corn starch. The corn starch typically costs 4x as much as potato flour so … :-S