WHOLE ORANGE & CHOCOLATE CAKE GF (low sugar)

so so orangey. this is the chocolate version of the whole orange cake made with fructose.

This is the kind of cake that I like. It’s not all fussed up with cream and decoration, it uses entire fruit skin and all, it is not over-sweet, it uses nuts in place of flour, it improves after a couple of days – in short it is more than the sum of its parts. The cake recipe is adapted from a Claudia Roden recipe for a Sephardic Jewish orange cake and wows with its bitter orange/marmalade taste and for sensitive souls it happens to be gluten free too.

INGREDIENTS for a circular 20cm cake tin

1 orange plus the juice it was boiled in (I’ve sometimes boiled them dry and when that happens as long as you haven’t cremated the thing its fine to add a little boiled water – approx 100ml)
3 Eggs
125g Ground almonds (I blitz them in a blender and I often use almonds with the skins on)
35g good quality cocoa powder/ 30g polenta (“malai”)
120g Sugar or 100g Fructose or 100ml honey or 100ml agave syrup but you need to increase the almonds a little as this is quite a liquid mix to begin with. Note that if you do make your mixture a little too wet you can add a tablespoon of rice flour or cornflour.

HOW TO

Wash and boil the orange unpeeled, in water to cover for 1 hour or until it is very soft. Let cool then cut open, remove the pips and turn into a puree in a food processor adding the water that is left from the cooking pan – approx. 100ml of cooking juice.

Beat the eggs and sugar in a large bowl until they are foamy. Really do keep whisking until they leave a trail from the beater.

Fold in carefully, so as to just amalgamate the ingredients but not knock out all the air from the mixture. Pour into a cake tin with a removable base that you have buttered or oiled.

Bake in a preheated moderately hot 160C convection/ 180C non convection oven for about 1 hour. Check by inserting a skewer – it should come out clean. If it is still very wet, leave it in the oven for a little longer. Cool in the tin before turning out.

(I once was in a hurry and turned it out when it was still hot, burnt my fingers and dropped the entire creation on the floor…so please people! “do as I say not as I do.”)

To Decorate

I like the cake as it is but for a special occasion it is splendid to cover in chocolate ganache and decorate with orange confit slices. I made a birthday cake like this for somebody who didn’t want an over sweet cake and it was very popular.

Childsplay Cinnamon Oatmeal Cookies

a recipe to keep kids (and therefore parents) happy for hours and hours and hours…

The cookies have a pretty high ratio of oats (good) and kind of (for they are cookies) lowish sugar. If you are concerned about sugar I’ve suggested how to use substitutes and reduce it further. They are all butter. Please don’t use margerine. The resulting dough should come out literally like “play doh” so that it can be handled without fingers getting too sticky. You can put all kinds of things in it but half the fun is giving the kids bowls of raisins, chopped apricots, nuts (as long as no allergies) , chocolate chips, cranberries and all manner of things and letting them create their own shapes and recipes of cookies. They can play like this for hours!

You can make them the old fashioned way with a wooden spoon, a mixing bowl and a lot of energy (preferably that of a young child ) or use a food processor / Kitchen Aid/ Kenwood which of course the kids love operating and teaching you how to use 😉

Ingredients

hard to say how many cookies as depends on the size of the hearts, turtles, mountains, volcanoes, bridges and bats that are created…

Butter at room temperature 250g (that makes “creaming” it with the sugar way easier and avoids tears)
Sugar 250g (brown organic sugar if you feel virtuous although dont be upset when your kid tells you the mixture looks dirty). You can use agave nectar but increase the flour to 250-275g.
2 eggs (be prepared to add a little milk should the mixture be too crumbly as maybe your eggs were small ones )
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (not strictly necessary but great for kids to sniff real vanilla although sniffing habits to be discouraged in general of course. Vanilla sniffing is, as far as I know, safe. Try and avoid the synthetic stuff as its a derivative of the wood pulp industry – sniffing resin derivatives not quite so innocuous)
200 grammes flour plus a bit extra for facial decoration and general messing around
1 teaspoon baking powder (in Romania “praf de copt”) and I dont add any extra salt
1/2 teaspoon or 1 teaspoon cinnamon powder
360 grammes oats (in Romania “fulgi de ovaz”) – by volume this seems alarmingly high – fear not!

Other things you can add: Chocolate chips or a bar of chocolate chopped up, raisins, sultanas, cranberries, nuts, chopped apricots, banana chips. You can either add into the mixture or allow the kids to decorate and create their own cookies. This can keep them occupied happily for a long time plus they also design lots of different things with the dough really creatively.

Gadgets & Gizmos

A powerful vacuum cleaner (just kidding!) You can make with a wooden spoon and bowl but kids do get bored a bit fast so if you are doing it the old fashioned way make sure the butter really is very soft. Cheat by microwaving it very very gently on defrost setting – that way you wont melt it into a puddle of oil. Alternatively use a Kitchen Aid/ Kenwood or a food processor to wizz up the dough in no time at all. Buy a roll of baking paper (“hartie de copt”) and if you dont own a great collection of baking trays then your oven should come with one if not two metal trays and ceramic dishes work pretty well too. Its not about the equipment anyhow!

Set the Oven to 180C

How To

Step 1 – Creaming the butter & sugar

Mix the butter and sugar together either with a wooden spoon or with the K beater of your Kitchen Aid. What is key is that the butter “disappears” like in a magic trick 😉 and the result is a fluffy mix of butter and sugar. Now you should add the eggs next and then other ingredients but I add all the other ingredients together.

Step 2 – Add the rest of the Ingredients and mix gently and then mix faster

At first mix gently as you don’t want eggs slopping out of the bowl. When everything is incorporated you can mix faster/ turn p the speed so that the dough comes together in one big clunky lump. However avoid the temptation to mix for a long time because you will develop the gluten in the flour and then your cookies will be tough. (tough cookies not good in this instance).

To create the cookies, dip your hands in flour and have some flour on the work surface. Roll little balls in your hand and flatten them gently on to the baking paper that you have placed on your trays and dishes.

Step 3 – Cook for only 10 minutes until just golden.

They dont need longer. Allow them to cool before handling because when they are hot they are not solid.

Go forth and create cookies! Enjoy!

Pomegranate & Rosewater Sorbet

An intense elixir of pomegranate made sultry with the rosewater. Best served by a flotilla of eunuchs whilst reclining on your chaise lounge in the summer pavilion. If none available (eunuchs not pomegranates) substitute with a small silver tray and a glass of iced hibiscus tea

The pomegranate has been imbued with mythical properties by almost all the ancient civilizations – like some edible ever present talisman. The fruit has been venerated through the ages in poems, paintings, carvings and carpets and for some reason this Korean “sijo” (a traditional form) with its bittersweetness resonated:

Pomegranates

It rained last night. The pomegranates,

Red and orange-red,

Have all burst open into flower.

Not to be comforted,

I sit in this cool pavilion

Set in a lotus lake

And under its glass-bead curtains wait

For my closed heart to break.

Sin Hum (1566-1628)

Translated by Graeme Wilson (1972)

So while in ancient China the pomegranate was regarded as a symbol of fecundity and images were often hung in houses of the fruit bursting with seed to encourage fertility the ancient Egyptians saw it as a symbol of success and prosperity (although did use the juice for treating tapeworm, successfully one hopes). Meanwhile the ancient Greeks knew it as the fruit of the dead and believed it to have sprung from the blood of Adonis plus they spiced up the myth of Persephone by having her scoff a few pomegranate seeds condemning her to extra months in the underworld with nasty boy kidnapper Hades. Over in ancient Israel it was pomegranates that the scouts brought back to Moses to demonstrate the fertility of the promised land while the Koran mentions pomegranates specifically as examples of good things God creates. All in all not a bad showing in the annals of history for a little red fruit.

Today many of these ancient myths have cascaded down through the ages and become diluted and mutated as some of the rituals and customs we know in the parts of the world where the fruit grows: In both Greece and Turkey a pomegranate is smashed at midnight on New Year’s Eve and the more seeds that scatter on the floor the more good luck there will be for the year ahead. In Armenia the pomegranate is the symbol of life itself and in parts of the country the old tradition of a bride smashing a pomegranate on her wedding night (the spilt seeds guaranteeing children) is still kept. And in Iran, no wedding spread which is a set of symbolic objects and foods, is complete without a bowl of pomegranates which are considered heavenly fruits.

And so while in the 21st century we seem obsessed with food as a collection of chemicals and nutrients which we know this has in bags I hope this recipe claims back a little of the magic and sensuousness of this ancient and mystical fruit.

This particular recipe transports me back to so many corners of Turkey: the pomegranate tree in my friend’s garden in Alacatli, fresh squeezed juice in Istanbul, sticky “Nar eksisi” (pomegranate molasses) dribbled over countless salads and the pure and good pomegranate sorbet made by my favourite Turkish food writer Cenk Sonmeszoy in his stunning blog: http://cafefernando.com/pomegranate-sorbet-recipe/

The recipe is not complicated and can be made without an ice cream maker, it really relies on one ingredient and that is freshly squeezed pomegranate juice and that means getting messy.

Ingredients

Makes approx 1 litre of ice cream

500ml freshly squeezed pomegranate juice. This is 4-6 pomegranates depending on their size, age and juiciness. ( I use a citrus juicer. I am sure many people will be raising their eyebrows but thats how I do it and it works ok.)
125g sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice (I know its a bit counter conceptual as the pomegranate is sour but it brightens the result I think)
2 tablespoons of pomegranate molasses (I like the depth this gives. If you don’t have any, you can substitute 1 teaspoon of black treacle, not more)
1 tablespoon of rosewater or half a teaspoon of rose essence (a word of warning: not all rosewaters and rose essences are created equal. Plus what tastes strong at room temperature does not taste strong when frozen. So getting this right is difficult. Err on the side of caution and go with your personal taste. nobody likes soap flavoured sorbet)

Gadgets & Gizmos

A citrus juicer and an ice cream maker although you can make it without the ice cream maker.

How To

Juice your pomegranates. I do this over the sink area as it does result in massacre like scenes of pomegranate debris and juice splatter.

Take half the juice and add the sugar and then just very gently warm it until the sugar has dissolved. Now let it cool down. Put it in the fridge with the rest of the juice until its really very cold.

If you need to prep your ice cream machine do that.

Now, when all the ingredients are cold, mix everything together and put in the churning container of your ice cream maker. My machine needs two goes for this quantity.

Scoop out into a suitable freezing container and (crucial) cover with baking parchment before placing the lid on.

I like to serve with small shortbread biscuits I make myself that do not contain too much sugar as I think the buttery richness contrasts well but I don’t want super sweet biscuits as then the sorbet would seem bitter.