Nigella's Clementine Cake

The baking series continues today, in honour of the clementine season, with Nigella's clementine cake. Nigella Lawson, the English Domestic Goddess and television cook, presumably needs no introduction. More of her treats can be admired in, for instance, her baking book How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking, with its unbelievably fine photographs.

The clementine is apparently a cross between a mandarin and an orange that was found in Algeria in 1902. It is said to have got its name from Brother Clément, a French missionary, in the garden of whose orphanage it was found. A clementine is smaller than a mandarin, its skin is softer, and it has very few pips. The shops are full of clementines just now, so this interesting, citrus-scented recipe is definitely worth trying. Being flourless, it also suits coeliacs perfectly.

What makes the recipe unusual, to my mind, is that the clementines are boiled for a long time and used skin and all. All that zest then shows in the finished cake as a gorgeous orange. Nigella herself says she adapted the recipe from Claudia Roden's orange and almond cake. No flour goes in at all, nor any butter, and almonds take their place. Nigella uses them ready ground, whereas I ground chopped almonds from the shop finer in a blender. A heaped teaspoon of baking powder is all the raising agent it needs.

The recipe takes 375 grams of clementines, which for my batch meant four. They are left to simmer over a low heat for two hours, long enough for the smell to spread through the whole flat. After the boiling they look like a pug, with skins too big for them, as the picture shows. By then the skin is so soft that the fruit can be puréed whole with a hand blender, once the pips have been fished out. You can poke about inside with your fingers without a care, since it all ends up as purée anyway.

The purée is beaten smooth with the almonds, sugar and eggs, and the batter is so loose that it is poured into the tin. A springform tin of about 21 centimetres will do. Two hours of boiling and an hour of baking mean that this is not a quick cake. When it has been in the oven for 40 minutes it is covered with foil so that the top does not burn, and once done it is left to cool completely in its tin. On the slice in the picture the top has darkened to a reddish brown in spite of the foil. Inside, the cake is a yellowish orange with small bits of peel showing in it.

Nigella urges patience, and tasting the cake only on the following day, when its moisture and flavours have had time to settle. The cake keeps well, so it can safely be made a few days before the treat is wanted, which means it could be made now for Christmas.