1. Ground almonds: I ground blanched almonds myself to a semi-fine powder using an electric spice grinder. You can use either store-bought almond flour (typically made with blanched almonds that are ground very fine) or almond meal (made with skin-on almonds that are ground somewhat coarse).
2. You can use orange-blossom water, orange juice and
zest instead of rose-water, lemon juice and zest respectively in the recipe.
3. I have baked the cake at a lower temperature for the latter half of the baking time. You can also bake it at 350 deg.F throughout, but you may need to tent the top to keep it from browning too rapidly. Some cracking on the top of the cake is expected, but it doesn't matter as you will be inverting the cake anyway.
4. You can also decorate the cake with fresh organic rose petals instead of dried rose petals.