Gluten Free & Vegetarian
This is incredibly easy to make; even if you’re stressed out, it won’t topple you over into nervous collapse. It’s such an accommodating kind of cake: it keeps well, indeed it gets better after a few days, and it is perfect either as a pudding, with some creme fraiche, or as cake.
It is a wonderfully damp, dense and aromatic flourless cake: it tastes like one of those sponges you drench, while cooling, with syrup, only you don’t have to.
Ingredients
4-5 clementines (about 375g total weight)
6 eggs
225g sugar
250g ground almonds
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
Method
Serves: –
Put the clementines in a pan with some cold water, bring to the boil and cook for 2 hours. Drain and, when cool, cut each clementine in half and remove the pips. Dump the clementines – skins, pith, fruit and all – and give a quick blitz in a food processor (or by hand, of course). Preheat the oven to gas mark 5/190ºC. Butter and line a 21cm Springform tin.
Add all the other ingredients to the food processor and mix.
Pour the cake mixture into the prepared tin and bake for an hour, when a skewer will come out clean; you’ll probably have to cover with foil or greaseproof after about 40 minutes to stop the top burning. Remove from the oven and leave to cool, on a rack, but in the tin. When the cake’s cold, you can take it out of the tin. Said to be better a day after it’s made.
can also be made with an equal weight of oranges, and with lemons, in which case increase the sugar to 250g. With this varation, add a glaze made of icing sugar mixed to a paste with lemon juice and a little water.