Monday, September 9, 2013

Mandarin almond cake


I have just started a low sugar low carbs diet to try and shift a little of my gut, which has been creeping up in the last few years.  For this purpose, my naturopath asked me not to eat any fruit for the next couple of weeks.  Unfortunately, I had 3 beautiful mandarins in my fruit bowl that I didn't want to waste.  My immediate thought was - let's make cake with them!

I used this recipe for Mandarin Pistachio Cake, because it uses the whole mandarins.  I was intrigued!  It was also flourless, even better in my current circumstances.  I just substituted almond meal for the pistachios, and ended up with this cake:



My notes:

  • The cake is quite soft and fragile, so be careful when unmoulding it and handling it in general.
  • The cake is also very moist, almost pudding-like, but this is how it is meant to be - it doesn't mean it's not cooked.
  • I added a plain icing sugar glaze, and was glad I did, as the cake has a slightly bitter edge from the  mandarin peel.
  • Although I didn't eat a whole slice (I just tasted some stray crumbs due to my diet),  I can say that it tasted better the day after baking when the flavours had melded - it made the cake less bitter.
Hope you all have a good week.

6 comments:

Lorraine @ Not Quite Nigella said...

Oh that's a version of the Claudia Roden cake except with mandarins instead of oranges and pistachios instead of almonds. It's a favourite cake of mine-I love the texture :)

yummychunklet said...

Oh, I love using almonds in cakes. They have such a delicate texture!

Blond Duck said...

I never thought of mandarins in a cake! Yum!

Kari said...

If you're going to be temporarily avoiding fruit and sugar and so on...well, this is a good way to transition to it :-) What a beautiful cake!

Johanna GGG said...

lovely cake - and ironically just like one my mum served me yesterday so I can imagine just how good it must taste - good luck with lowering the carbs and sugar - hope it is not too hard when you love baking as much as you do

Kayte said...

I don't know about this whole carb thing, you made this gorgeous citrus almond cake and couldn't eat a slice, even a teeny tiny slice? Boo on that! The cake is gorgeous, I do not know how you resisted.