For her delicious alternative Christmas cakes, food writer Joanna Weinberg turns to some of her favourite ingredients – bejewelled pomegranates, fragrant clementines and orange blossom water
Christmas rolls around again. Strange, isn’t it, that while we reach for the same classic recipes – mince pies, turkey, Brussels, plum pudding, Christmas cake – every year the voices of dissent get louder. Not surprising, really, when many of these flavours, the cakes and sweetmeats in particular, hail from a time when those spices and dried fruits were the very end in luxury. It makes sense that, along with access to every ingredient under the sun, our palates have changed. Doesn’t a light, damp and bejewelled pomegranate and orange cake sound perfect? Or one made from fragrant clementine, almond and orange blossom water? Raisins be damned, here are my favourite cakes for Christmas:
Pomegranate & orange cake
(adapted from Diana Henry)
Serves 6
For the cake
50g breadcrumbs
100g ground almonds
175g soft light brown sugar
2 tsp baking powder
finely grated zest 1½ oranges
215ml olive oil, plus more for the tin
4 eggs, lightly beaten
seeds from ½ pomegranate
For the syrup
juice of 1 orange
100ml pomegranate juice
1 tbs pomegranate molasses
2 tbs runny honey
To serve
Crème fraîche or Greek yoghurt spiced with a little ground cardamom
In a bowl, mix together the breadcrumbs, almonds, sugar and baking powder. Add the orange zest, olive oil and eggs and stir well until everything is combined.
Pour the batter into an oiled 20cm springform cake tin. Put it into a cold oven and set the heat to 190C and bake for 45-50 mins until cooked right through. Meanwhile, make the syrup by gently heating all the ingredients together. Stir a little until the honey has dissolved, then increase the heat and simmer for 5 minutes. You should end up with about 100ml of syrup.
When the cake is cooked, pierce holes all over the surface and slowly pour the syrup all over. Leave the cake to cool completely in the tin. Scatter with the seeds just before serving.
Almond, clementine and orange-flower cake
Serves 6-8
225g butter, cubed, plus extra for greasing
75g polenta flour, plus extra for dusting
225g blanched almonds
225g caster sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 eggs
finely grated zest and juice of 2 clementines,
finely grated zest and juice of ½ unwaxed lemon
2 tablespoons orange blossom water
To serve
icing sugar, for dusting
Crème fraîche or Greek yoghurt spiced with a little ground cardamom
Butter a 20cm springform tin, then shake some polenta flour all around the inside and tip off any that doesn’t stick.
Preheat the oven to 170C/gas 3. Toast the almonds in a dry pan over a fierce heat for a few minutes, stirring often, until they begin to colour very lightly. Transfer to a food processor and whiz until fine.
Add the butter, sugar, polenta flour and baking powder and whiz again until you have a fine mix that is beginning to ball up like very heavy marzipan. Add the eggs one at a time, pulsing until absorbed, then add the citrus juice and zest and orange blossom water. Give it one good final blast to check the mixture has combined evenly, then pour the batter into the prepared tin.
Bake for 50–55 minutes, until the top is golden all over and a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Wrap in tin foil and leave to smugly sit and improve for a day if you have the time, or just allow to cool and dust with icing sugar before serving.
Joanna Weinberg has written cookery columns for The Times, Red and currently Conde Nast Traveller. She has written two cookbooks, How to Feed Your Friends with Relish and Cooking for Real Life, published by Bloomsbury, and runs Kitchen Table Cookery School at The Talbot Inn, Mells, Somerset
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