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.

Olive Oil, Clementine and Almond cake (egg-free)

This is one of the weirdest cakes I have ever made.  I adapted the recipe from an old little baking book I’ve had for over 10 years (called Baking by Emma Patmore).  I love this little book and have used it umpteen times over the years but admittedly the recipes are a bit hit and miss so you can never tell how they will turn out. 

However, this one, titled ‘Olive Oil, Fruit and Nut Cake’ attracted me because of the olive oil ingredient.  Something I have been wanting to try in a cake for a while now.  It also had no eggs which is maybe what made this batter so strange to handle.

Well, from the start I could tell that the 50g of sugar specified in the recipe would not make it sweet enough so I increased the amount and tweaked the amounts of the other ingredients to balance the recipe.

Maybe I shouldn’t have experimented with the recipe without trying it out in its original form first.  The batter was dough-like and oily and I was very close to just chucking this away.

I’m glad I persevered though and saw it through to being baked because it turned out to be a very tasty, dense, crusty cake with an amazingly gentle Clementine flavour.  I don’t know if it would work with any other citrus as even oranges are a little too sharp and despite the increase in sugar this still wasn’t a very sweet cake.

Very, very different from the usual light airy sponge, this cake doesn’t rise very much and looks almost raw in the middle and needs a dollop of cream on top, but I feel it has its own charm and I really enjoyed it.  I also loved the pairing of Clementine with almonds which is the second time I have tried it now after my Clementine and Clove Biscuits.

Anyway, it’s a good recipe to have if you have any friends or family who are allergic to eggs, although it’s not the best eggless recipe I have ever tasted.  That goes to a chocolate cake I made from Teawith Bea’s which I will make again soon I think.

Olive Oil, Clementine and Almond Cake (adapted from Baking by Emma Patmore)

·         250g plain flour

·         1 ½ tsp baking powder

·         75g caster sugar

·         6 Clementines, zest

·         50ml Clementine juice

·         75ml single cream

·         125ml olive oil

·         50g flaked almonds

Preheat the oven 200 C, prepare a 7” round cake tin.

Sift together the flour and baking powder and stir in the sugar.

Combine the Clementine juice, zest, single cream and oil together.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet.

Beat together until the flour and sugar is well incorporated into the wet ingredients.  I found I had to use an electric beater as beating by hand the oil wasn’t absorbing into the mixture very well.

Place the mixture into the tin and bake for at least 40 minutes and longer if needed.  If you find the cake is browning too much on top then add a foil cap about 30 minutes into baking.  When a skewer comes out without too much moisture on it, it is done.

Cinnamon, Walnut and Courgette Cake

I’m so sorry for the bad lighting in some of my photos so far.  It’s been pouring down in Scotland (and the UK!) for the past few weeks – you know, the type of weather where you have to keep the lights on even in so called daylight hours.  Not that we have much daylight right now as it’s dark by half past three.

I’m also very new at photography.  I got my camera just a couple of weeks before I started this blog and it’s my first DSLR camera.  I have absolutely no idea about the functions or workings of DSLR cameras.  The minute I got it I briefly checked how to turn it on, what buttons to press to take a pic and how to charge the battery.  Then it was a matter of turning it on to auto-focus and snapping away.  I love my camera and do want to learn more about it, so I’m going to take a module at the Open University in May on how to become more knowledgeable about one.  Can’t wait.

Now this cake was made because after owning The Humming Bird Bakery: Cake Days for over a year, I hadn’t used it all that much.  The only recipe I think I made of theirs were the Earl Grey Cupcakes which turned out very nice indeed.  But I hadn’t made anything after that and thought it was about time.

This caught my eye naturally because of the cinnamon and also because I had lots of courgettes that needed using up.  I also love oil based cakes.  I think oil gives the cake a lot more bounce, softness and a much tighter crumb.  I feel that oil- based cakes cut better without crumbling all over the place and make the cake lighter somehow too.  I know butter will always win out on taste, but where the cake is heavily flavoured (like here with cinnamon) then it doesn’t become that important.

This is the type of recipe I love because it is so easy to make.  It’s one of those ‘mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients’ method and the main ingredient quantities are all in ‘3s’ (3 eggs, 300ml oil, 300g sugar etc) so very easy to remember.

I replaced the butter and yoghurt icing that the recipe specified, for a Swiss Meringue Buttercream icing instead.  The cake really impressed everyone; it was lovely and soft with a warm cinnamon flavour and contrastingly nice crunch from the walnut bits.  I made this again (after numerous requests from my sister-in-law) but with almonds instead of walnuts and no icing and it was just as good for a teatime treat.  I honestly think this cake is wonderful on its own sans any kind of icing but I will include the one given in the recipe if you would like to try.

Cinnamon, Walnut and Courgette Cake (from The Humming Bird Bakery: Cake Days)

·         3 large eggs

·         300ml sunflower oil

·         300g soft light brown sugar

·         ½ tsp vanilla essence

·         300g plain flour

·         1 tsp baking powder

·         1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

·         2 tsp cinnamon

·         ½ tsp ground ginger

·         ½ tsp nutmeg

·         300g courgettes, peeled and grated

·         100g walnuts, chopped roughly

Preheat oven to 180C and prepare two 8” round cake tins.

Combine the wet ingredients together; eggs, sunflower oil and sugar, in large bowl.

Sift together the dry ingredients; flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg.  Add the dry ingredients to the wet in two batches, mixing well after each batch.

Add the grated courgettes and chopped walnuts into the batter making sure you fold them in thoroughly.

Bake for about 40-45 minutes (although check after about 30 minutes to see if they are done).  Allow the cakes to cool for about 5 minutes in the tin before turning them out onto a wire rack to cool.

Frosting (from The Humming Bird Bakery: Cake Days)

·         240g unsalted butter, softened

·         1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon

·         750g icing sugar

·         75g Greek yoghurt

Whisk together the butter, cinnamon and icing sugar until the mixture is sandy in consistency with all the butter fully mixed.

Whisk in the yoghurt on a low speed until it is combined, then turn the speed to high and whisk the icing until light and fluffy.

Assembly

Once the cakes have cooled, slice each in half to make four layers. 

Stack these on top of each other with frosting between each layer, using a little between each layer and leaving a larger amount to frost the top and outside of the cake. 

Dust the top with a little cinnamon – I used a craft stencil and dusted the cinnamon through that, giving a pretty effect.