Almond Macaroon Custard Cake

Last year while doing my online recipe research, I discovered something called a leche flan magic cake. Essentially, this is a cake that is baked together with some custard, and during the baking process, the custard magically separates from the cake creating custard at the top and cake on the bottom.

When I came across the recipe, I thought I would try the method as an extra twist to a new sticky toffee pudding cake that I was creating at the time…I’m glad that I did because it was a big hit.

Since then, I had also wanted to make the same thing using my almond cake recipe which I love so much, so I made it a few times until I found the right amount of time required to bake the custard.  The first time I made it, the cake was baked for 1 ½ hours as it was in the sticky toffee pudding cake, but the custard was soft and looked as though it did not set as well, so I increased the time to 2 hours and that seemed to solve the problem, but the custard still seemed more delicate.

This difference really got me thinking…

Can the addition of the butter in the cake batter make the custard richer and therefore more challenging to set as it bakes?

That could quite possibly be true…since melted butter and oil don’t behave the same in solution. While doing my research, I discovered that most people made the custard component from scratch however all of them used cake mixes for the cake part which are all oil based…

So even though the butter based cakes taste fine, from now on, it’s only going to be oil based cakes in this type of recipe.

Almond Macaroon Custard Cake

1 recipe almond cake

1 recipe caramel (for top as seen in sticky toffee pudding)

1 recipe custard (as seen in sticky toffee pudding)

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Fist you must make the caramel and pour into the non stick bundt cake pan. Swirl the caramel around so that it coats the bottom of the pan evenly (which will be the top of the cake once inverted). Then use some pan spray for the rest of the pan where the caramel has not touched so that the cake and the custard are sure not to stick to. Make sure to get the center of the bundt pan too.

Make the custard and pour it into the pan once the caramel has cooled. Prepare the cake batter and add it evenly all over the custard. At this point it will look like everything has mixed together, but it’s OK. Now you must prepare a water bath, so get a larger cake and place your bundt pan inside of it. Pour about 2” of water into the larger cake pan and then cover the whole thing with foil.

I like to use a little pan spray on the foil so that it does not stick to the cake as it bakes, but that is up to you. Cover this with foil and place this whole set up into the center rack of your oven. Bake it for 1½ hours covered with the foil and then remove the foil for the remaining 30 minutes and continue to bake the cake until golden brown.  Allow this to cool and then refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight. When ready to serve, simply invert onto a large round, flat serving dish. If the edges of the pan were adequately sprayed, this will not require any coaxing and should pop out on its own.