Almond Cake.
Take a pound of almonds; blanch them in cold water, and beat them as small as possible in a stone mortar with a wooden pestle, putting in, as you beat them, some orange-flower water. Then take twelve eggs, leaving out half of the whites; beat them well; put them to your almonds, and beat them together, above an hour, till it becomes of a good thickness. As you beat it, sweeten it to your taste with double-refined sugar powdered, and when the eggs are put in add the peel of two large lemons finely rasped. When you beat the almonds in the mortar with orange-water, put in by degrees about four spoonfuls of citron water or ratafia of apricots, or, for want of these, brandy and sack mixed together, two spoonfuls of each. The cake must be baked in a tin pan; flour the pan before you put the cake into it. To try if it is done enough, thrust a straw through it, and if the cake sticks to the straw it is not baked enough; let it remain till the straw comes out clean.