This vegan whole orange cake is very loosely based on a cake that featured on This Morning with Richard and Judy sometime in the 1990s. The charm of it is that you start off by boiling a whole orange in water before blitzing it in a food processor.
In rethinking a recipe that included no fewer than five eggs, I altered pretty much everything except for the boiled orange, but it’s a really simple recipe, nonetheless, with just six straightforward ingredients.
This could equally be called an orange drizzle cake, which is what it is, but it’s the whole orange that makes it special and gives it its tangy orange flavour and bright golden colour.
The texture is soft and moist with a sticky, syrupy top, so it works well as a dessert cake.
Although we generally chuck the peel away when we eat oranges, it’s full of fibre and valuable nutrients including Vitamin A and calcium, so it’s nice to be able to eat the whole fruit once in a while.
vegan whole orange cake…
ingredients
- 1 medium unwaxed thin-skinned orange (roughly 180 g)
- 200 g self-raising flour
- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 100 g desiccated coconut
- 90 ml olive oil
- 140 g white or golden sugar
for the orange drizzle
- the juice of a second orange (roughly 80 ml)
- 60 g white or golden sugar
method
- First, place the orange in a small pan (preferably one with a lid) and cover it with water. Heat to boiling point and simmer for around an hour. Remove the orange from the water and rinse it under a cold tap for a minute so that it’s cool enough to handle.
- Set the oven to 180°C/360°F and lightly oil/line the base of an 8″ round or similar sized baking tin – ideally a loose bottomed or springform tin to make it easier to extract the finished cake.
- Grind the coconut to a rough flour in a processor or coffee grinder. Set aside in a large bowl.
- Cut the orange into chunks and remove any pips before placing in a processor or blender, peel and all, and pureeing until no chunks of peel are visible.
- Add the olive oil to the orange and continue blending to form a smooth light puree.
- Sift the flour and bicarbonate of soda into the bowl with the coconut.
- Add the sugar to the flour mixture, and whisk to break down any little clumps of coconut.
- Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and pour in the orange mixture, stirring lightly.
- Measure 100 ml of water into the blender jug and swirl this around to collect the last of the orange pulp before adding this to the cake mixture and stirring or folding gently until combined. (If your orange was smaller or larger than 180 g to begin with, you can adjust the water up or down a bit to compensate – it should be roughly dropping consistency). Don’t over stir the mixture.
- Transfer to the baking tin and level the top before baking for around 45 minutes until it’s well risen with a rich orange-gold top. An inserted skewer should come out clean.
- While the cake is baking, juice the other orange (it doesn’t matter if the result is less than 80 ml – you can simply reduce the sugar proportionately and there will still be plenty of syrup even with 50 ml and 35-40 g sugar). Stir the sugar into the orange juice and allow it to dissolve and turn syrupy.
- While the cake is still warm, prick the top all over with a thin skewer or toothpick and drizzle over the orange syrup. It is best to do this in two or three stages, allowing the syrup to soak in each time.
- Allow the cake to cool before removing it from the tin and cutting.
- It is best eaten with a fork if eating right away, but it will settle eventually so that you can pick it up with your fingers.
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