This cake, apart from being a dense intense cake reminiscent of halva, is also flour-less and butter-less, it has very little sugar as well...so its a pretty healthy cake. With all those eggs and brilliantly coloured orange puree, it's a very pretty cake. While making it, the batter goes from frothy and light, to heavier, but prettier.
In the colours of orange as you would see in a frothy Lucknowi chikan. In fact, it made me so homesick for an Indian sweet, that I added some orange blossom water to it, to give it more of an eastern flavour, or rather, Araby flavour - ah all the perfumes of Arabia!!
While this is a quick and simple cake, it does take time, you need to start preparations for it overnight.
What you need:
Equipment:
Food processor
Cake tin and baking paper.
Preparations
Butter and line the cake tin. This is the only butter in the cake! Dust with a little flour. Ditto.
I can't resist showing you the vintage blue tin that I bought from the markets for the large sum of $1!
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The Day Before
Wash two large navel oranges and boil then in plenty of water for 2 hours. Keep the water at a boil, and top up with hot water.
When done, remove from the water and leave to cool overnight.
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Ingredients
2 large navel oranges
250 gms almond meal
1 teaspoon baking powder
250 gms caster sugar. (I didn't have enough caster sugar, so I topped it up with 100 gms of raw sugar.)
6 eggs
1 teaspoon orange blossom water, if you dont have any, try rose water. This is what Im adding to give it an oriental feel. Next time, I may even add a tiny dash of cardamom powder.
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Steps
Dry the boiled oranges and chop roughly before processing till smooth in a food processor. About three minutes at medium speed.
Scrape out of the processor, and rinse the processor in readiness for further blitzing action.
Note: Sniff for calming orange aromas!! |
Mix the almond meal, baking powder, caster sugar together in a bowl and mix with a balloon whisk to ensure that everything is well mixed together.
The mixture should resemble semolina without any lumps.
Preheat the oven to 170 C. |
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Add the eggs to the rinsed out food processor and beat at medium speed for 5 minutes. Time it on the clock.
The Eggs will be transformed into a light and airy prettiness!
After the eggs are beaten, pour in the dry mixture and gently mix with a spatula. Add the orange blossom water.
Process at slow, stopping once or twice to mix by hand to ensure that it is well mixed. The egg mixture will drop and become less frothy, but it will still be an astonishingly pretty light orange colour. |
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Pour the mixture into the prepared baking tin, and place in the preheated oven.
Bake for an hour until the center is firm.
Remove from oven and cook in the tin for 20-30 minutes. Turn out from tin serve in large wedges.
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