Orange Almond Cake

We have a few friends over for tea and decided to bake a cake. Looking through my collection of recipes, I decided on either the Orange Almond and Chocolate Supreme cake from Gabriel Gate's recipes. Undecided on the cake to make for the afternoon, I bought ingredients for two cakes and ended up making them both.

I started the day putting the oranges to simmer and preparing the blanched almonds. This flourless Orange Almond cake is basically based on the traditional Sephardic Jews recipe. The Sephardi are originally from the Iberian peninsular (where Spain and Portugal is) where oranges are plenty.

This is truly a slow-food - having to prepare the blanched almond from scratch and simmering the orange for two hours. 
Put on my favourite CD and work on the almond til the last song on the CD.This is the best way to chillout. Alternatively, you can buy ready blanched almond or ground almond meal.

After putting in the Orange cake to bake for an hour, the girls left to go for a walk in the park to work out an appetite, when it is time for to start working on the next cake.

"This flourless Orange cake is moist and had the truly awesome orange flavour. As the almonds are not finely ground, it has a nice texture."

Ingredients

2 Unblemished oranges
1 1/2 cups Blanched Almonds
1 cup Castor Sugar
5 eggs (size 61 gm)
1 tsp Baking Powder
Icing sugar for dusting

Method

1. Buttered or lined a 20cm (8 in) cake tin.
2. Place the washed oranges in a pot with enough water to cover. Bring to boil, cover and simmer for two hours. Drain oranges and allow to cool.
3. Blend almonds and sugar in a food processor until almonds are in quite small pieces. Transfer to plate.
4. In the same food processor, blend the whle oranges to a puree. Add almond and sugar mixture and blend briefly before gradually adding the eggs and baking powder, blend until smooth.
5. Pour the mixture into the cake tin and bake in preheated oven for 1 hour Cool for 10 mins before unmoulding to a cake rack.
6. Dust with icing sugar before serving.