Tannie Maria’s almond cake for winning a farm girl’s heart

Tannie Maria’s almond cake laced with Amaretto liqueur. (Photo: Ed O’Riley)

21 Mar 2025

Here’s another sublime recipe from Recipes To Live For (A Tannie Maria Cookbook) by Sally Andrew. It’s an almond cake with Amaretto liqueur topping. This one has a love story attached to it, involving an almond farmer, a shotgun and a jackal.

Sally Andrew is the author of the Tannie Maria murder mystery series. The cookbook of recipes that come from these novels, Recipes To Live For, is full of traditional Karoo fare, with a fresh twist, as well as some spectacular new inventions. It also contains gorgeous photos of the Klein Karoo, agony-aunt letters from the (fictional) Klein Karoo Gazette’s “Love Advice and Recipe Column”, and some of Maria’s wise and quirky quotes.

The TV series Recipes for Love and Murder is showing internationally in more than 100 countries. Season 2 is recently out on M-Net and Acorn TV, among other channels.

Almond cake with Amaretto glaze

Tannie Maria’s almond cake laced with Amaretto liqueur. (Photo: Ed O’Riley)

(Serves 8-10)

Ingredients

For the cake:

1 cup flaked almonds

2 cups (200g) almond flour

2 T polenta or mealie meal

A pinch of salt

6 eggs, separated

1 cup (200g) castor sugar

1 cup buttermilk

1 t vanilla essence

For the cream cheese icing:

½ cup (125g) firm cream cheese

½ cup (125g) butter, at room temperature

1 cup (140g) icing sugar, sifted

½ t vanilla essence

Amaretto glaze:

½ cup water

3 T Amaretto (almond liqueur)

½ cup white sugar

1 t vanilla essence

Method

1 Preheat your oven to 180°C. Grease and flour two 20cm cake tins.

2 Place the flaked almonds in a single layer on a baking tray. Bake for 10 minutes or until the nuts start turning a pale golden brown. Remove from the baking tray and set aside.

3 In a large mixing bowl, stir together the almond flour, polenta or mealie meal, and salt.

4 In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks and castor sugar until pale in colour.

5 Mix the buttermilk and vanilla essence, and add to the egg yolk mixture.

6 Fold this liquid mixture into the almond flour mixture.

7 Whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks, then gently fold into the batter.

8 Spoon the batter into the cake tins.

9 Bake for 25 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Check 10 minutes before the end of baking time, and loosely cover the tins with foil if the colour is getting too dark.

10 To make the cream cheese icing, beat together the cream cheese and butter until light and fluffy. Add the icing sugar and beat well. Mix in the vanilla essence. Put the icing in the fridge for about 20 minutes to firm up.

11 When you take the cake layers from the oven, allow them to cool a little in the tins on a wire rack. In the meantime, you can make the glaze.

12 Mix all the glaze ingredients in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir until the sugar has dissolved and the glaze has thickened a little.

13 Turn the cakes out onto the rack. While the cake layers are still warm, brush lots of glaze onto the top of each, again and again.

14 While the glaze is still sticky, sprinkle the toasted flaked almonds over the cake that will form your top layer. Gently push the nuts onto the cake, making sure they stick.

15 Allow to cool completely.

16 Spread a comfortable layer of cream cheese icing on the bottom cake layer, and then sandwich the cakes together.

Note

Instead of making this as a double-layer cake, you can make a larger, single-layer sheet cake. Use a sheet cake tin of about 30cm, and bake for about 35 minutes. You can then adapt your toppings (glaze, icing and almonds) as you choose. DM

Copies of Recipes To Live For as well as the four books in the Tannie Maria mystery series are available from all good bookshops, or go to www.sallyandrew.com/buy/

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