Gluten free cake

A good few years ago we brought home a small orange tree from a holiday in Majorca. It produces half a dozen or so large, sweet fruits each year. Family will be home for Christmas and a couple of them eat gluten free. I know that my oranges are free of any sprays and chemicals and therefore just the thing for a recipe that uses the whole fruit, both flesh and skin.

Fig and orange cake

Ingredients

2 oranges         

6 eggs

225 ground almonds

225 castor sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

3 figs

Preheat your oven to gas mark 5

Place oranges in a pan of boiling water, cover and simmer for about an hour until soft. Pick out any seeds then puree.

Whisk eggs and fold in all the other ingredients excepting the figs which are for decoration. You will have a very loose mix. 

Place in a greased and papered loose bottom  20cm tin.  Decorate the surface with sliced figs and bake for an hour until firm and a good golden colour. Leave to cool in the tin.

I should have kept mine in the oven for another five minutes because the centre dropped a little as it cooled.  Glaze the cake once it is cold. I used a fig liqueur simmered with a spoonful of redcurrant jelly but the recipe in my book suggests using campari. (I photographed before putting on the glaze - the cake is now VERY shiny, so I don't think that a glaze is really necessary.)

The cake is in the freezer for now. We shall eat it either on it's own or with a dollop of fig ice-cream.