Norwegian caramel-almond Tosca cake. Sound good? It should, because it was delicious.

First, a note of clarification: Ojakangas spells this recipe Toscakage in her book, but as this would actually be the Danish spelling and she calls it a Norwegian cake, I’ll use the more Norwegian Toscakake instead. I am sure this recipe exists in Denmark and Sweden as well, but each country spells it differently (the Swedes would use Toscakaka). Minor differences, but they do exist. With that aside, on to the cake!

I was invited to a friend’s for dinner yesterday and I found myself searching The Great Scandinavian Baking Book for something relatively quick and easy to prepare for a dessert. I normally wouldn’t go to the cake section for this, but I was flipping through and happened to spot the Toscakake. Relatively short list of ingredients, not a lot of prep time, simple to make. It was a winner.

There are essentially two parts to making this cake: baking the cake and putting together the topping. The cake part itself came out fairly light and spongy, a little bit like angel food cake. The second part was pretty straightforward, too: browing some sliced almonds and then adding sugar and cream to make an almondy, caramel-ly topping to slather over the cake. I popped the whole thing in the oven for a few more minutes so that the topping could harden a little bit and turn a nice golden-brown color.

The end result is perhaps not the prettiest cake in the world, but a fairly simple and quick cake to make from scratch. I’d say it’s appropriate for special occasions just as much as it makes a nice coffee cake. And on Sunday mornings, like this morning was, it makes a pretty delicious breakfast.