Boiled orange and almond cake with chocolate ganache

Tam West

This recipe is one I’ve been making since I was an apprentice chef in Melbourne - 33 years or so ago. It’s from the Egyptian mother of a chef friend and it’s a recipe you’ll see appearing in numerous cookbooks every year. It’s dense and moist, and is gluten and dairy free (apart from the ganache). I’ve found it really helpful to have in my repertoire for those dietary reasons. You can replace some of the orange with lemon, mandarin or tangelos - just make sure you remove all the pips - and use whichever spices you prefer. You can also replace up to quarter of the ground almonds with desiccated coconut.

Orange and almond cake

3	Oranges, skins wiped (Main)
250 g	Caster sugar
300 g	Ground almonds (Main)
6	Eggs
2 tsp	Baking powder
1 tsp	Ground cinnamon
1 tsp	Ground ginger

Chocolate ganache

150 g	Cream
250 g	Chocolate, broken into small pieces, use a chocolate between 30-70 per cent cocoa solids
¼ tsp	Vanilla extract

Directions

For the cake

1. Heat oven to 170C fan-forced. Line the base of a 25cm spring-form cake tin with baking parchment. Don't grease it.
2. Put oranges in a pot, cover with water and bring to the boil.
3. Reduce heat to a gentle boil, put a lid on, and cook for 20 minutes.
4. Remove the oranges from the water, cut in half, remove seeds and leave to cool for 20 minutes.
5. Cut the orange halves into quarters and place in a food processor with the sugar. Blitz to a paste.
6. Add everything else and blitz again to a paste.
7. Pour into tin and flatten surface. Bake 40-50 minutes.
8. Test the cake with a skewer — it will come out a little moist (that's the nature of the cake) but make sure there is no uncooked batter.
9. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for an hour or more. Take it from the tin and lay on a plate, then pour the ganache over and even up with a spatula. If transporting the cake, it could be made ahead of time and iced the next day.

For the ganache

1. Warm the cream almost to boiling in a pan. Take off the heat and leave 1 minute.
2. Add the chocolate and vanilla all at once and gently stir until it has completely melted.
3. If it is quite runny, leave to firm up a little before pouring on the cake or it may run off.