Monday, February 14, 2011

Chocolate Orange Cake

I came across this recipe while looking for recipes for my entry for my work's holiday party bakeoff in December.  I ended  up making chocolate bacon mini cupcakes, but this chocolate orange cake stuck in the back of my mind.  Part of the reason I was hesitant to tackle it at first was that is uses an ingredient I had never used before- ground almond meal, and the fact that the measurements for the ingredients were European, so grams and degrees celsius!  In the end I decided to face my fears and attempt this recipe.

I found several versions of this cake, some with chocolate and some just orange and almond. 

This website featured a recipe for almond orange cake and also had a video showing the process of making the cake.  From this website I learned that, "Flourless Orange and Almond Cake is a classic Passover dessert drawing on the Sephardic traditions of Morocco, the Mediterranean and the Middle East (where citrus was more available)"  Interesting!....

I ended up using the recipe from this website:

Ingredients
2 Oranges
6 Eggs
1 tsp. baking powder
50 g. Cocoa Powder
200 g. Ground Almonds
250 g. Caster Sugar

Boil the oranges for 1 hour.


 The almond meal was hard to find!  Henry's had it, but they were all out of it.  After checking Ralph's and Vons I finally found it at Whole Foods.  And it wasn't cheap! About $10 for the package.


This is probably the first time my roommate's kitchen scale has ever been put to use.
Measuring out the "caster sugar" which I learned is just another name for "superfine sugar."
I converted the grams into pounds using a conversion calculator online.


Also an opportunity to bust out my electric mixer! Yay!


So preheat to 170 celsius or as we like to say in America 338 fahrenheit?
and butter a 23 cm (9 inch) pan.  Blend the oranges skin and all!  I used a food processor.
Then mix everything else up, pour into pan and pop into the oven for 50 minutes-1 hour.


It came out super moist and had a strong chocolate orange flavor.
An experiment ending in success!





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