Almond Cake

When I was young, I bought a recipe book titled “The Victorian Kitchen Book of Cakes and Cookies”.  It contained a recipe for “Fine Almond Cake”.  The cake looked delicious so I decided to try it.  The recipe contained no baking powder nor did it call for self-raising flour.  At the time, I wondered if neither of these were invented back then, although with the benefit now of Mr Google, it seems they were.  I figured perhaps the 12 eggs that the recipe specified were enough to provide volume and rising.  In my experience at least, this did not turn out to be the case.  While the cake had a lovely flavour, it was so dense and hard that it was quite inedible!

Hence, when I started putting together this recipe, the first ingredient on my list was baking powder!

The cake has a delicate almond flavour and is very moist.  It doesn’t rise a lot during cooking and tends to stay flat on top.

Ingredients:

• 4 eggs
• ⅔ cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 1½ teaspoons vanilla essence
• 1 cup ground almonds
• ⅓ cup brown rice flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder

Method:

Line a 20cm round cake tin.

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C.

Place the eggs, sugar, oil and vanilla essence into a bowl.  Beat together until well combined and frothy.

Fold in the ground almonds, flour and baking powder.  Ensure all of the ingredients are thoroughly combined.  The mixture is quite runny.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 50 minutes.  Test with a skewer before removing from the oven.  The cake will be shrinking away from the sides of the tin when it is ready.

For me, I don’t feel this cake requires icing, however, you may wish to sprinkle the top with icing sugar before serving.