Marzipan and Chocolate Ice Cream










Marzipan and Chocolate Ice Cream – Adapted from Love and Olive Oil


5 egg yolks
7 ounces almond paste, crumbled or cut into large chunks
2/3 cup sugar, divided
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1 Ritter Sport Dark Chocolate with Marzipan, coarsely chopped









Almond Cake

Almond Cake

There’s a great cookbook, called “Baked Elements: Our 10 Favorite Ingredients,”  written by the two guys that own the bakery Baked in Red Hook, Brooklyn. In it, they provide different recipes that use their favorite ingredients, including malt, caramel, and bananas. The book is great, the recipes fantastic, and the 10 favorite ingredients are spot on but there is one glaring omission, in my opinion: almonds, or more specifically almond paste.


Something magic happens when you take almonds, mix them with sugar, and grind them into a paste, commonly known as marzipan if the sugar percentage is sufficiently high. They turn into something so addictive (at least for me), that I’ve been known to eat a whole stick of marzipan in one sitting. In fact, making marzipan is the first food I ever prepared.


I was six years old when one day in school, our teacher taught us how to make amygdalota, marzipan that’s shaped into round fruit shapes, rolled into granulated sugar, and decorated with a single clove to resemble the fruit stem. I have never forgotten that day. The excitement of making the delicious amygdalota, bringing them home to show my mom, and then eating them on top of it all was just too much joy to ever forget it.


Since then, I have loved anything and everything that uses almond paste, like this recipe for almond cake. This is an amazing cake. It’s moist and tender, with a distinct, but not overpowering flavor of almonds.

I have good news and not-so-good news about the cake. First, the good news. This is a single bowl cake, so it’s easy to make. The bowl in this case is the bowl of a food processor. Everything is added in order and processed to make the batter. It takes just a few minutes and you have very little to clean afterwards.

Now, the not-so-good news. You know how sometimes you’ll find an amazing recipe that uses really healthy ingredients but somehow makes something that tastes really rich and sinful? Well, this is the opposite kind of recipe. It uses lots of butter and eggs and sugar but the resulting cake tastes light and harmless. I’m not sure why, but I’d like to think that it’s the almond paste. In my book, it makes everything better.


Almond Cake – Very slightly adapted from

1 1/3 cups (265g) sugar
7-8 ounces (198-225g) almond paste (not marzipan)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 large eggs, at room temperature


2. In the bowl of a food processor, grind the sugar, almond paste, and 1/4 cup (35g) of flour until the almond paste is finely ground and the mixture resembles sand. It will only take a few seconds but make sure there are no clumps of almond paste left.



4. Once the almond paste is completely broken up, add the cubes of butter and the vanilla extract, then process until the batter is very smooth and fluffy.


5. Add the eggs one at a time, processing a bit before the next addition. Scrape the sides down as needed.

After you add all the eggs, the mixture may look curdled (mine didn’t). It’ll come back together after the next step.


