Whole Orange Cake – rind and all!

I love this Orange Cake for the nutty flavour, damp and sticky texture, the beautiful orange flavour, and the unique method by which it’s made: blitzing whole oranges, rind and all, with almond meal, sugar, eggs and baking powder. No oil, no butter, no whisking!

Terrific easy cake for gatherings. And because it’s gluten-free and lactose free, everyone can enjoy it!

Whole Orange Cake

If you’ve spent a lifetime peeling oranges, it might sound strange that this cake is made using a whole orange.

But here’s the thing – as with lemons and limes, most of the orange flavour is in the rind. You will get way better orange flavour by mixing 1 tablespoon of finely grated orange zest into, say, Vanilla Frosting, rather than 1/4 cup of orange juice. Not to mention that zest doesn’t make frostings and cake batters watery.

So – we like rind for flavour. But we don’t like the pith – the white part underneath the skin – because it’s bitter.

Solution: boil the oranges. This removes the bitterness as well as softening the oranges to make them “jammy”, which makes the cake damp and sticky inside.

What goes in Orange Cake

Just 5 ingredients:

• Whole fresh oranges

• Almond meal (aka ground almonds) – see note below

• Sugar

• Eggs

• Baking powder (make sure it’s gluten free if you’re making this as a gluten free cake)

Just a note on a couple of the ingredients:

ALMOND MEAL / GROUND ALMONDS

This is literally raw almonds that are blitzed into a fine powder. It’s easily found nowadays, sold in the dried fruit & nut section and health food section of grocery stores.

You can also make your own by blitzing 250g/ 9oz raw, unpeeled, unsalted almonds in a powerful blender (I use a Vitamix) until it becomes a fine powder.

Almond flour is different but can also be used. This is made with blanched, peeled almonds, blitzed until it becomes powder form. It is lighter in colour (because the brown skin is removed) and it has a finer texture so it will give it slightly fluffier consistency. It also has a slightly less pronounced almond flavour.  Almond flour is not as common in Australia. I’ve purchased it from those health food places where you serve yourself from tubs, like Scoop Wholefoods. 

ORANGES

The fresh oranges cannot be substituted with orange juice – the batter in this recipe relies on the thickness of the pureed oranges. Also, using whole oranges delivers massive orange flavour that OJ can never replicate!!

You will need 2 medium oranges about 8cm / 3″ in diameter (think baseball size) totalling around 600g/1.2 lb. You don’t need to be exact here – if they weigh more, your cake will be a little bit more moist. If they weigh less, that’s totally fine – almond meal cakes are super moist already, you won’t feel deprived.

But obviously if you have tiny ones, use multiple!

Can lemons be used as well?

Unfortunately not! Tried, and it was too bitter because the ratio of pith to flesh is higher. But it had a gorgeous lemon flavour. Still working on it!

How to make Orange Cake

The method used for this orange cake recipe is quite unique with the bonus being that it’s easy and low-effort. As mentioned above, oranges are boiled to soften and remove the bitterness from the pith (white part of rind). After this, they are blitzed – rind and all – with the remaining ingredients to make the batter.

You normally can’t use a food processor or blender for cake recipes made with flour because they’re simply too powerful so they will overwork the gluten in the batter, resulting in horridly hard, rubbery cakes!

FIRST – BOIL AND CHOP

1. Boil oranges in water for 10 minutes;

2. Drain, then repeat twice more. (ie 3 x 10 minutes) The purpose of this step is to remove the bitterness from the white part of the rind – if you skip this (and there are some recipes that do) then the cake will be bitter. Shortcut: Boil 40 minutes without draining, but keep an eye on water level. The flavour is marginally “cleaner” if you change the water as directed, but this shortcut is perfectly acceptable;

3. Slice oranges and remove seeds; then

4. Roughly chop – no need to be meticulous here, it’s just to help it blitz faster.

THEN – BLITZ AND BAKE!

1. Place in a food processor. Blender also works, but I find it more tedious to scrape all the batter out. A NutriBullet works brilliantly for the blitzing but is too small for the whole batch of batter . So just do the oranges first, pour into bowl, blitz remaining ingredients, then mix everything together in the bowl;

2. Blitz for 3 x 10 second bursts on high, scraping down the sides well, until you no longer see the large lumps and it’s looks like jam. It may take longer depending on the strength of your food processor. Basically, the less orange rind bits, the better – but some rind bits are ok, great jammy texture!

3. Add the remaining ingredients – almond meal, baking powder, sugar and eggs, then blitz until well combined. If at this stage you realise there’s still too many rind chunks, you can blitz for longer;

4. Pour into a lined cake pan – 1 x 23cm/9″  (cake will be 4 cm / 1.7″ tall) or 2 x 20cm / 8″ (cake will be 3 cm / 2.2″ tall);

5. Bake for 60 minutes until the cake is golden and a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean; and

6. Cool in the pan – it’s too fragile to remove while warm. The cake will shrink some, as you can see in the photo above.