Before we left for our holiday, I had a dozen or so recipes that I’d been itching to try out.  Plus, I’ve been dying to road test my brand spanking new mini individual cake tin pan! Now that I’ve recovered from the post holiday blues, I’m back in the kitchen with renewed fervour!

So while I had the rhubarb and ginger blondies baking in the oven on Sunday, I got started on prepping for these mini cakes.  The recipe (adapted) requires boiling whole oranges twice over (for around 15 minutes each in order to reduce the bitterness of the peel) and then letting them sit on reduced heat for around 2.5 hours.  So while I had that going on the heat, I was tossing up whether to make a single 9 inch cake or make mini cakes.  It was a no-brainer really, I couldn’t wait to unwrap my Bakers Secret mini individual cake tin pan from its shiny (not really) new plastic!  

Despite my best intentions, this recipe ended up being your usual flourless orange cake, something I was desperately hoping to avoid (not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I’m currently on a “combining exotic ingredients” fetish).  I came across this recipe in Gourmet Traveller and with a name like “orange, cardamon and almond cake” I thought, “oooh, this sounds very interesting”.  I thought the cardamon and cinnamon spices would create a Moroccan-inspired cake, however the orange is so intense that you wouldn’t even know there were spices in this cake (which is why I ended up labeling this post as a flourless orange cake)!  I should also mention that I added a huge amount of lime zest to the cake, as well as combining orange and lime (in equal parts) to the icing, and again you wouldn’t know there was lime in this cake either unless you had a strong taste palate! 

I know it sounds like I’m bashing on the intensity of the orange, which just to be clear, I’m not! In fact, this cake is wonderfully orange! It’s just that when I set out on making this cake, I was really hoping the other flavours of the spice and lime would shine through as well!

In any event, this cake really is suburb and I would be proud to serve this to anyone!  What I also love about this cake is that being flourless, it refrigerates so well and doesn’t lose any of its moisture. Two thumbs up!