Swedish almond cake

Swedish almond cake called Toscakaka is easy and delightful; the recipe based on Dan Lepard's book Short and Sweet.

Swedish cooking? Oh yes

Swedish cuisine is unfairly thought to be just a melange of rolmops and meatballs. It is an ignorant and discriminatory attitude because the Swedes have a ton of extremely interesting dishes in their culinaria.

But like all the other north Europeans, they are scorned for not having things cooked with olive oil and artichokes. Those critics could stop and think that it's no big deal cooking tasty stuff with gorgeous produce: try and cook a fine dinner with cabbage.

And they do that in Sweden: kalpudding is a meatloaf made from cabbage and it's properly delishhh.

Swedish cakes are lovely

And they are no mean cake bakers. There is kladdkaka, a sort of Scandi death by chocolate. There is fantomen cake, a heavenly concoction of chocolate base and coconut topping (not sure why it's called 'phantom' as it's very real and quite hefty) - and there's this.

This is called Toscakaka in Swedish. Or perhaps Toscatårta, but I doubt it as all the sweets in Sweden are kakas. A Swedish soft (mjuk!) butter cake (kaka!) with a caramel almond topping.

Toscakaka, the Tosca cake

So when I first encountered Toscakaka, I very naively imagined that ‘tosca’ would mean ‘almonds’ in Swedish. A very wrong guess – it is, rather grandiosely, named after Puccini’s opera. Such a simple cake? Those Swedes? A little cake feeling self-important! But then I remembered that we have Victoria sponge which will teach no foreigner new words for ‘jam’ or 'cream’.

Tosca cake is a very nice little number and I apologise to all Swedes if it sounds a little condescending. It is not my belief that simple, whip-things-together-and-mix-a-little recipes are inferior, by any means. With very little effort you can achieve smashing results; just look at midnight oil cake or the raisin cake. They are gorgeous and they are my firm favourites.

Tosca is still a LITTLE number (in 18cm tin unless you scale it up), easy to whip up in 15 minutes plus the baking time.

How to make Tosca almond cake

It's a standard cake batter made by beating eggs with sugar, followed by flour and melted butter. So far, so ordinary sponge. The beauty of it is that it can be made days ahead, stored in the fridge and then turned into a proper pudding.

The topping of almond flakes, butter and cream cooks in minutes into light almondy caramel and tops the baked sponge.

You can blast it under the grill for a couple of minutes or, if all is made on the same day, hike the oven up and return the cake there, topped. Served warm, with a dollop of cream, yoghurt or ice cream it will be a bullseye of a dessert.