French Almond Cookie Cake with Apricot Cream Cheese Glaze is sweet, fragrant, rich, soft, chewy and strongly almond-flavored. Extremely fast, easy, and perfect for a brunch, shower, or anytime you need a smaller-sized cake that’s both easy and unique.
Almond extract lends the most wonderfully rich, nutty, and sweetly perfumed flavor to anything it touches.
And it touched this unique cake plenty in the three tablespoons I used.
French almond cakes are typically rectangular little cakes that have a firm, crusty exterior and a moist, soft interior. They’re also known as financiers because traditionally they look like gold bars. But since no one I know has financier molds to make individual cakes, one 9-inch cake is my solution.
It’s one of the easiest and fastest cakes I’ve ever made, and goes from cupboard to pan to oven in less than five minutes. Just one bowl and a whisk is all you need.
French almond cakes are typically made without chemical leaveners such as baking powder or soda, and rely only on eggs for lift. This creates a dense and moist cake, with an interior that resembles the interior of Cookie Bars.
Some recipes use almond meal or almond flour, but I didn’t want to run the risk of weighing down the leavener-less cake with nut-based flour and used trusty all-purpose.
I don’t like actual nuts in baked goods, but extracts are fair game. Biting into nuts in a soft cookie or tender piece of cake is as bad as biting into eggshells. Crunchy, they catch you off guard, and just don’t belong.
So I’m especially grateful for almond extract to give this cake all the almond flavor it has going.
If you’ve never bought almond extract, it’s sold near the vanilla extract in the grocery store. At my grocery store, a one-ounce bottle of store-brand real almond extract was $2.99. Imitation almond extract was also $2.99, so I went with real and happily used almost half the little bottle in the recipe and it’s the star of the show.
The cake is bursting at the seams with sweet almond flavor. Two tablespoons of extract are used in the cake batter, and one tablespoon in the glaze. I wanted to make sure I knew this was an almond cake, not a cake masquerading as one, and used the extract liberally.
It’s traditional to top the cake with jam or slivered almonds, and I used apricot-peach jam mixed with cream cheese, draped over the top. I could happily smear that mixture on everything I see. The tang of the cream cheese cuts some of the sweetness from the jam.
My husband especially loved this unique little cake. It reminds me of a giant chewy sugar or snickerdoodle cookie infused with almond, and baked in a cake pan.
It has chewy edges like a blondie bar or snickerdoodle cookie bar, while the interior is soft, dense, rich, and moist.
While it was baking, my husband came out of his office and asked me what that heavenly smell was. Almond extract is like sweet perfume that permeates the air in the most lovely way.
It’s sweet, light, and feels like spring. I think it would be perfect for a brunch, shower, or any time that you need a smaller-sized, fast, and very easy little cake.
And I really want to eat eat the glaze by the spoonful, especially the little chunks of apricot that peek through.
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French Almond Cookie Cake with Apricot Cream Cheese Glaze
Ingredients
Cake
- ¾ cup unsalted butter, melted (1 stick + half of 1 stick)
- 2 large eggs, at room temperature
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- ¼ cup light brown sugar, packed
- 2 tablespoons almond extract
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
- ½ cup toasted slivered almonds, optional for sprinkling (I did not use)
Apricot Cream Cheese Glaze
- ¾ cup apricot-peach jam, or a pineapple, peach, apricot or favorite jam
- ¼ cup cream cheese, softened
- 1 tablespoon almond extract
Instructions
- Cake – Preheat oven to 350F. Spray a 9-inch cake round with floured cooking spray, or grease and flour the pan; set aside.
- In a large microwave-safe bowl, melt the butter, about 75 seconds. Allow butter to cool momentarily so you don’t scramble the egg.
- Add all remaining cake ingredients (except flour) and whisk until smooth. Stir in the flour until just combined; don’t overmix. Turn batter out into prepared pan. Top with optional slivered almonds.
- Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until top is golden and set, and edges will be firmer and pulling away slightly from sides of pan. A toothpick inserted in the center should come out clean or with a few moist crumbs, but no batter.
- Allow cake to cool in pan on a wire rack for about 15 minutes. Turn cake out onto rack and allow it to cool completely. While cake cools, make the glaze.
- Apricot Cream Cheese Glaze – Combine all ingredients in a small bowl and whisk until combined, or beat with a mixer until combined. Spread glaze on top of cake (don’t not have to be completely cooled), slice and serve. Cake will keep airtight in the refrigerator for up to 5 days. I refrigerated it because of the cream cheese, glaze but if omitting or using another kind of glaze, cake can be stored at airtight at room temperature for up to 5 days.
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
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Have you tried French almond cake or financiers before? Almond extract? Nuts in desserts?
I’ve never been to France or had the real thing, but I’d be happy to go on a taste-testing trip in the name of field research as soon as someone wants to buy my airline ticket.
OMG! I just made this and I haven’t tasted the cake yet but I am putting the extra glaze on crackers and tasting it and it is to die for delicious!!!
Thanks for trying this recipe and I agree, the glaze is super tasty! Any kind of jelly/jam with cream cheese is a winner :)
Late posting on this one, but I just wanted to say that when you say five minutes, you mean five minutes! My goodness, never had such a decadent in texture cake from so little effort! Loved! And so did my last minute guests lol (hence why I needed a five minute prep dessert!!)
Glad you loved it and it was such a hit!
Hi Averie,
I made this cake yesterday. My family LOVED it. The almond flavor really came out strong. *I’m gonna try to make it with a raspberry glaze . I also made the softbatch Funfetti Sugar Cookies. Quite lovely. :) Hope u had a nice weekend.
So glad you tried this cake and enjoyed it! I bet it would be great with a raspberry glaze! And so glad you tried the Funfetti cookies, too! Sounds like you’ve had a great baking weekend :)
hello…i just loved ur recipe n would like to make it…but can u pls tell me how much is 1 cup in terms of grams for ur recipes…n also can u pls tell me wht can i substitued cream cheese with…we don’t get any cream cheese in the small town i stay…plsssss help…thank u…
Please google for a recipe conversion tool from cups to grams.
Cream cheese – You could simply just make a butter-based glaze instead.
hello again…thanks for ur reply but i have google conversion from cups to grams but there r many websites with different measurements…can u pls tell me ur measurements for recipes n also u said butter based glaze…can u pls tell me how to make butter glaze as am new to this techniques…will be waiting for ur reply..thank once again… :-)
https://allrecipes.com/howto/cup-to-gram-conversions/
Melt butter, add confectioners’ sugar, whisk until smooth. That’s your glaze.
Cake and cookies at the same time! I have to try this :)
Lovely work, Averie! Would you be happy to link it in to the current Food on Friday which is creating a collection of recipes using apricots or nectarines? This is the link . I do hope to see you there. There are already quite a lot of links for you to check out. Cheers
Oh goodness, this looks DELICIOUS. I LOVE everything about this cake! The ingredients sound as inviting as the colours/photos look. I had featured u in the post of Top 7 Sweet Cakes for Mother’s Day on AllFreshRecipes,Pay close attention to ur more Eats!
Thanks for the feature! I appreciate it and if you try this cake, you will love it!
I’m hoping to try this for my dad’s birthday! I’m just really excited by how dense this looks. Just wondering how you managed to make your glaze stay so pretty on the cake! <3 My previous affair with glazing a cake turned out to be rather disastrous despite cooling my cake for 45 minutes. :( Am I cooling it wrong or am I making the wrong glaze?
This is the easiest cake I’ve ever glazed. Just pretty much slap it on with a spoon and smooth it out with the back of a spatula. This glaze is NOT a fussy glaze. Some are highly fussy; this isn’t one of them!
So. Amazing. I made this in my cast iron skillet and baked it for 33 minutes. Perfect. The apricot glaze really takes it to the next level. Thanks for sharing. Happy Mother’s Day to me!
I’m so glad to hear you made it and that you enjoyed it! I agree that the apricot glaze takes it to the next level. And good thinking just using a cast iron!
I’ve been looking for an almond extract many times, but could not find it. Could I skip it or better, replace it with something?
How about Gran Marnier or a fancy liquer? Vanilla, of course. But the flavor of this cake is truly dependent on the almond extract. If you sub with something else, the cake won’t be the cake I made; it’ll still be good, just not an ALMOND cake if you skip the ALMOND extract. No way around that one!
Averie,
I’m going to make this recipe to celebrate my parents anniversary, but am confused over the almond extract. Maybe it’s “pregnancy brain” kicking in or something, but isn’t 1 oz = 2 T? But you only bought one 1oz bottle of almond extract and using 3T of it in the recipe was using about half the bottle? I just want to make sure I buy enough extract and don’t mess this up – it looks amazing!
Thanks for clarifying =)
Sophie
I used 3 tablespoons. 2 in the batter and 1 in the frosting. A one-ounce bottle will be fine; you are confusing liquid and dry weight measurements in your mind; they are not always the same, ie. 6 oz of milk and 6 oz of powdered sugar would look very different. Don’t overthink it :) Just add your 2 and 1 tbsp’s respectively, and you’ll be fine.
Thanks! The liquid-dry thing with oz does have a tendency to throw me off and I didn’t even think about that! :-)
Yes, you were thinking of butter, where 1 ounce is 2 tbsp. With something like extract (or liquids) all that math & rules go out the window :) I expect a full report now how this cake turns out for you! :)
Oh, this is a mouth-watering dessert! I love almond desserts, this is wonderful :)