Frangipane: easy almond cream recipe

Frangipane is a delicious filling for cakes, pies, tarts and other pastries. You bake this velvety almond cream in tart bases or in cakes, including various types of French pastries. Another bonus is that frangipane – using only ground almonds – is naturally gluten free.

What is frangipane?

Frangipane, as the name suggests, is a basic French recipe (also called creme d’amande) for a cake filling based on almond meal, sugar, eggs and butter.

Funny enough it took me quite a while before I first started using frangipane. And it is such a great addition to so many different baking dishes, that I’m not sure anymore why I didn’t use it sooner.

It’s also a recipe that appears in many French pastry recipes (like galette des rois!) and it is delicious when used as a pastry cream in fruit tarts or in a shortbread base tart.

A frangipane almond filling is baked and makes a tart or pie nice and creamy. It is often combined with fresh fruit, simply because that is a classic combination.

I love using it with summer fruits. You only need 4 ingredients to make your own frangipane tarts and you can make it in a few minutes. ‘A child can do the laundry’ as we like to say here in the Netherlands (meaning that it’s really easy)!

Frangipane Recipes

This almond cream filling is a true French classic. It consists of a crispy tart shell filled with a baked frangipane filling. A common name for such a tart is a bakewell tart. You might have heard of this before. This filling is sometimes topped with apples or pears, which adds a nice fresh element.

It’s also delicious as a croissant filling and you might have tasted it before in almond croissants (my favorite croissants!) I have made a pear frangipane tart in this way that is simply unbeatable. And you can expect some delicious frangipane based recipes in the coming weeks and months. I’ve got quite a few lined up already.

What you need

You need just a few simple ingredients to make a homemade frangipane cream, unless you want to make your own almond flour from whole almonds (white ones). If that is the case, use a blender or food processor. Be careful not to grind the almonds too long, as this will release the fats and make an almond butter instead of almond flour.

The frangipane is very easy to spread on a pie base using a spoon or a pastry bag. I personally find it very handy to use a palette knife to smooth it all out (as shown in the photos), but if you don’t have one at home, a spatula or knife will work just as well.

The recipe below is for the basic frangipane almond cream and gives you the main ingredients but keep in mind that you will need a base to use the frangipane on and that is had to be baked.

As a base, you can use buttery puff pastry, a pie crust, short crust or a store bought tart shell. There are different ways of using the creme frangipane and I’ll be sharing more on that later.