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04 April 2010

oh my darling, clementine cake

anyone who would ever pass up buying one of those little wooden crates of tangerines has to be some sort of citrus masochist (or allergic to citrus, which is not unheard of...). why anyone would pass up the taste of a tangerine-burp is mind-boggling... so refreshing!

i, for one, won't pass up a crate (especially when it's on sale), but there's only so many one can eat. so with the extra ones i didn't consume, i tried cooking them in these sticky tangerine cakes following nigella's recipe for clementine cake.


i wasn't about to spend 2 hours cooking tangerines so i smoldered them in the pressure cooker for less than half the time. they came out just as mushed up as being simmered on the stove for 2 hours. then i just pulsed them using a hand blender. the finished cake(s) came out as delicately sweet and almondy scrumptious as you can imagine they would taste in the photos with just 5 ingredients (almonds, eggs, clementines/tangerines, sugar, and baking powder).

(btw, if you don't have a scale (which you should even if you weren't a drug dealer), try following smittenkitchen's version, which approximates the weighted quantity in volume).

tangerines and clementines are variants of mandarin oranges so you can use them interchangeably (the major difference between them is that tangerines often have many more seeds than tangerines).

according to chinese lore, chinese ladies who were "hip to their time" used to carry mandarins in their hands so that they would smell like the citrus fruit. (i should check the oxford companion to food for the exact reference...)

anyways, good on you, nigella, for finally producing an easy-to-follow recipe that doesn't sound wacky!

DO, however FOLLOW to the recipe when it says to use parchment paper cause these suckers stick to the pan like doody to a chihuahua's butt.

1 comment:

  1. Hmmm, you ended with the mental image of a poop-caked dog butt (hyperlinked to a jpeg only slightly less horrifying than what is promised). . . and despite all that, I'm still hungry for some of these damn cakes. So I'd say mission accomplished. Thank you.

    The lump of cream something-or-rather in the pic on Nigella's site looks like a nice companion for these lonely cakes, but Nigella doesn't mention what the whipped concoction is.

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