Damp Apple & Almond Cake

Over the next couple of weeks I will be bombarding you with apple recipes as my Granny Smith tree out the back has a huge crop for a change, here is the first, a very interesting flourless cake from Nigella Lawson’s Feast. It appears under the Passover section and seeing how I don’t even know what or when Passover is & therefore am unlikely to ever celebrate it, what better time to make this cake then right now. I prepared the apples the day before & with that done the cake is incredibly easy to make, you just chuck everything in the food processor & whiz, no sifting, beating separate ingredients, etc.
The end result was a very moist (damp) cake indeed though in no way did it taste undercooked. The flavours all blended in beautifully & you couldn’t even really taste the apple flavour, it had a nice tang & reminded me almost of orange cake, strange as there was nothing orange flavoured to be found in the ingredients at all. Definitely repeatable.

Damp Apple & Almond Cake

Apple Puree
3 tart eating apples (or 4 small as I found I needed)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 teaspoons caster sugar

Cake
Almond oil/flavourless vegetable oil to grease tin
8 eggs
325g ground almonds
275g caster sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
50g flaked almonds

To Decorate
1 teaspoon icing sugar

Peel, core and chop the apples roughly. Put them in a saucepan with the lemon juice and sugar, and bring pan to a bubble over medium heat. Cover the pan and cook over low heat for about 10 minutes or until you can mash the apple to a rough puree with a wooden spoon or fork (You should have about 285g of puree). Leave to cool.

Preheat oven to 180c. Oil a 25cm springform tin with almond oil or a flavourless vegetable oil & line bottom with baking parchment.

Put the cooled puree in the processor with eggs, ground almonds, caster sugar & 1 tablespoon of lemon juice & blitz into a puree. Pour & scrape with a rubber spatula into the prepared tin, sprinkle with the flaked almonds on top & bake for about 45 minutes. Check after 35 minutes as oven temperatures vary. Put on a wire rack to cool slightly, then spring open. This cake is best served warm though is still good cold. Before serving, sieve some icing sugar over the top.