Orange, Apricot and Marzipan Cake

I wanted to make this cake with clementines.  But the mountain load we had of them surprisingly got finished.  I have a hungry family. 

This recipe is a good way of using up any marzipan you might have left over from Christmas.  And initially that is why I chose this recipe from Gorgeous Cakes by Annie Bell.  This book is one of my most used and most loved books, yet I had never tried this recipe.  

In the words of my brother, ‘This cake was bloody awesome!’  I don’t think I’ve ever heard my brother describe a cake in such a manner.  He’s not too into them.  Well, he is sometimes; it’s just that he’s a fussy eater.  Curiously, my little sister who is also a keen baker but is extremely hard to please when it comes to cakes also liked it and praised it highly.  Even more curiously, my other sister who is easy to please and usually loves everything I bake without prejudice thought it was a bit ‘blah’, a good cake but nothing exceptional. 

You know it’s because of the fact I have such varied input and feedback that I just no longer care really about what I bake.  I bake whatever recipe catches my eye or what I want to dream up because with a family as large as mine you are always going to please some and not really affect the others either way.  I don’t think I’ve ever disappointed though, which is a good thing.  At least I’ve never been told to my face anyway.  Saying that, I do love praise for my baked goods.  I’m not ashamed to admit it – it’s one of the highlights of baking.

Now back to the cake.  This was a layered recipe with shortbread at the bottom, topped with marzipan which was spread with marmalade which in turn was topped with a sponge cake.  It was a great opportunity to use up more of the home-made marmalade I made almost a year ago - it was my first time and I think I made a wee bit too much since it's still not finished. 

 This was inspired from what is called the ‘Orange and Marzipan Cake’ recipe in Gorgeous Cakes but curiously has no orange (zest or juice) in the actual recipe.  The only orange hit you are getting is from the marmalade. 

Well I wanted to change that, if I’m going to call a cake an orange cake it needs to have orange (either zest or juice) in it to warrant the name.  So I added orange juice in place of the rum and grated some zest to impart some real orange flavour into it.  I also swapped the raisins and sultanas for dried apricots just to stick with the colour theme.

I used golden marzipan instead of normal marzipan (again the colour theme) and 250g instead of the 200g specified in the recipe.  I did this because firstly I wanted a thicker layer of marzipan than what I could see in the book, and secondly because I changed the cake tin from an 8” round to a 9” round.  I’m glad I did this because I suspected that this might be a large quantity of batter and I was right, it was.  I was very happy with the height the 9” tin gave to the cake.  If it had been even higher than this then it would have taken even longer to bake than it did (my cake took 1 hour 10 minutes to bake).  

I also completely changed the shortbread that came with the recipe.  This was because I didn’t have enough butter for the shortbread and the cake so had to substitute Stork baking spread and shortening.  Because the Stork makes baked things soft I wanted to add a little shortening in order to give the biscuit that crispness and structure that butter imparts.  I also increased the flour amount and decreased the ground almonds.  It worked very nicely and I want to make this again as a separate bake.

I have large hands for a female.  I’m quite self-conscious about them as they’re not really the most feminine part of my body.  I once had one of those Bupa health checks they give you in gyms and after testing my hand strength my personal trainer noted with some admiration that my hands were as strong as some men’s.  He meant it as a complement but I was cringing inside.  I like dainty things but dainty I ain’t.  It was a little consoling that he did say that my job/hobby at the time (I was doing Swedish massage on clients) would make the muscles in my hands very strong.

One good thing my ‘man-hands’ come in handy for is measuring.  The span of my hand from my pinky to my thumb when I stretch it as far as possible is 9” exact.  So while rolling out the marzipan it was pretty easy to keep track of how much more I had to roll.  I liked working with marzipan, it wasn’t as hard as I imagined.  Even the taste was better than what I remembered – I have bad memories of marzipan confectionary I ate as a child.  But this was nice – better than sugared almonds which I’m not too keen on.

I’m sorry, I feel like I’m rambling a bit too much here – I’ll try to keep with the cake.  Ok, this also had apricots in it and I used that trick where you coat them well in flour so that they don’t sink to the bottom during the bake but it didn’t work.  They all sank down and nestled just above the marmalade and marzipan, making a neat layer.  I’m not really sure why this didn’t work – maybe the weight of them?  Although I did dice them pretty small.  The marzipan and marmalade was truly transformed in the heat of the oven, becoming this gooey chewy layer of sweet almondy orange yumminess.  The shortbread at the bottom gave the perfect contrast to this softness with its crisp biscuit texture.  The cake was soft and flavourful but not too light or airy and with a lovely orange flavour that wasn’t too overboard.  All in all, a very nice cake.

Orange, Apricot and Marzipan Cake

For the shortbread:

·         60g Stork baking spread

·         30g shortening (Trex)

·         40g caster sugar

·         120g plain flour

·         30g ground almonds

For the cake:

·         225g unsalted butter, softened

·         225g caster sugar

·         2 oranges, zest only

·         4 eggs

·         1 egg yolk

·         90ml orange juice

·         150g dried apricots, chopped

·         225g plain flour

·         1 ½ tsp baking powder

·         250g golden marzipan

·         75g marmalade (I used about 4tbsp)

Make the shortbread by combining all the ingredients together in a food processor and reducing to a crumble.  Or do what I did and just mix by hand until you have a dough you can handle.  Press it into the base of a prepared 9” round springform cake tin.  Lay a piece of cling film over it and chill in the fridge for at least 1 hour.

Roll out the marzipan into a 9” circle to line the cake tin.  There’s no real technique that I can tell you – just do the best you can.  Cut the end result if you need to.  Once you’ve got your circle, place on top of the shortbread layer (remove the clingfilm first).  Spread the marmalade on top of the marzipan layer.

Preheat oven to 180C.  Cream the butter, orange zest and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add the eggs and yolk one at a time.  Add the orange juice and mix in. 

Combine the flour and baking powder together and use about a tablespoon from this to coat the chopped apricots – this is to prevent them from sinking to the bottom but mines still did (to good effect).  Fold the flour into the butter mixture and then the dried apricots.

Spread the cake batter on top of the marmalade layer and even out the top.  Bake for 1 hour, adding a foil cap after about 40 minutes if the top is browning too much.  Mines took over an hour so keep an eye on it – if it passes the skewer test it’s done.  Leave to cool in the tin before carefully removing the cake.