Monday, May 3, 2010

Orange and Almond Cake

I've been watching a set of DVD named "Nigella Feast" lately and I have really enjoyed it. It is a collection of the entire TV series hosted by the English chef Nigella Lawson. She has a really fun and casual attitude towards cooking and does not use many fancy ingredients or advanced culinary techniques. Most of the dishes she makes are quite down-to-earth and they are recipes that you can really reproduce in day-to-day cooking. And she has an incredible way of describing the flavour, aroma, texture and the presentation of food. I think she has enough vocabs to describe food to write a food dictionary.
So naturally that results in me googling her name and browsing her website, which has a vast collection of recipes posted by both Nigella and members of the website. Based on her "Mother-in-law's madeira cake", I made a wholemeal orange and almond cake.

50g softened unsalted butter (the original recipe calls for 240g of butter but that was all I had in the fridge so I added additional fat using olive oil)
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup brown sugar
grated zest and juice of an orange
3 large eggs
1 3/4 cups self-raising flour
3/4 cup wholemeal plain flour

1) Preheat oven to 170 degrees C.
2) Cream the butter, olive oil and sugar together and add orange zest to the mixture. Add the eggs one at at time, with a tbsp of flour for each. Then gently mix in the rest of the flour and, lastly, orange juice.3) Grease and line a 23x13x7 cm loaf tin and pour the cake batter in. Sprinkle the top with flaked almond.4) Bake for 1 hour or until cooked through. Let cool in the tin on a wire rack before turning the cake out.

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