Chocolate Orange Cake

I make this cake quite a lot. It serves many purposes:

• Using clementines makes it feel a little bit festive
• George always asks for chocolate cake, but I find chocolate sponges a bit ‘meh’
• It lasts for days in a tin
• It is flourless
• There is no butter in it
• The flavour is reminiscent of Terry’s Chocolate Orange
• I like cakes where you blast it all up in the food processor
• Boiling the fruit makes the house smell of oranges
• It’s useful when I have been a crazy lady and accidentally bought eggs, twice
• It’s good to take round to a friends as it’s very portable
• I am a bit of a ‘feeder’ so it’s a good one as you can entice people on a diet  (fat free) or coeliacs (no flour) to eat it
• It makes an excellent dessert with a spoonful of crème fraîche
• When I get suckered in to 2 for 1 on bags of clementines and then realise we are never going to eat 20 between 3 of us, I can throw some slightly wizened ones into this

But most of all it is useful as I can enter it into…

Maison Cupcake’s Nigella Forever Blogging Challenge

I met Sarah from Maison Cupcake back at a Food Photography Workshop in October 2009. She was well ahead of me in the food blogging arena, and still is (#1 in the Wikio Blog rankings this month, I am way down at #50) and we have kept up with each others posts ever since. I like the little community that has built up between many of the online foodies. I even spent one evening a year or so ago talking to Sarah on the phone as she hunted around Walthamstow in the dark trying to sort out the right icing for a Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Back to the cake in question.

The original recipe is in Nigella Lawson’s Feast Book, but the recipe was also printed in the Daily Mail, way back in 2004. I have also made the original clementine cake, which is just as delicious and just as easy. The basic premise is that you boil 2 oranges or half a dozen (375g) clementines for a couple of hours, then pulverize it in a food processor. Then you add all the other stuff in one go and bake it for an hour.

I only messed it up once, the first time I made it, when I didn’t cook it for quite long enough as were dashing off on holiday. Do make a little foil hat for it for the 2nd half of the cooking so you can cook it for the full hour.

I tend to turn to Nigella when a cake is needed as I have never been let down by her methods or quantities like I have with many male ‘chefs’ recipes. She knows how to thoroughly test a cake recipe as well as how to eat one.

If you have a favourite Nigella recipe and a blog, why not cook it and enter Sarah’s #ForeverNigella Challenge?

Unfortunately I can’t show you a slice of this cake, served with crème fraîche and a grating of orange zest.

Because we ate it all.

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STOP PRESS

I just found a wee photo of the last lonely slice…