Gluten Free Cake Recipe

Next my gluten-free almond, orange and polenta cake. A delicious and straightforward bake and a perfect pud for a busy day. It's just truly joyful, it fills me with excitement to make this. Made with blood oranges, honey, free-range eggs, ground almonds and polenta. So I'm gonna make a cake inspired by the Mediterranean. It's really, really delicious and there's a few nice little curve balls in this recipe that not only make it sort of more interesting and a bit different from the usual sort of like butter-based cake. It's so, so good and with just five ingredients it's a joy to make and it's also something you could make the day before because it really stays moist and delicious for a long time. First up we're going to start with our olive oil. 200 millilitres goes in to a large bowl. Now to whip with that, just as we would any other cake, we're going to add sugar, but we're not adding sugar, we're adding honey. Absolutely amazing, 150 grams we're going to put into here and of course you can use any honey you like, runny honey makes life nice and easy. Into the olive oil, which unlike butter doesn't need to soften, so it's a real time saver. Just whisk up the mix and add three large eggs. Really nice organic fresh eggs. Beat for two minutes and in no time that's the wet mix done and we're already on to the dry. Okay the next ingredient that we're going to put in is 200 grams of ground almonds. This is going to give the structure to the cake and it's going to give incredible flavour, creamy nutty flavour and then a nice maybe more unusual ingredient is polenta, corn maize, basically dried sweet corn ground up. So we're going to go in with 100 grams of polenta, that's going to give it a beautiful colour and a lovely sweet flavour. Using polenta instead of flour is what makes this lovely little cake gluten-free. Then we're going to go in with a zest of three oranges and 50 mils of orange juice, it's going to give it the most fantastic perfume of orange and sometimes down the markets you can get blood oranges. You can do it with any oranges, you can even do it with tangerines or clementines but this is truly beautiful. Look at the colour of the skin, ruby red. So the zest has gone in, then I need the juice. Have a look at that, amazing colour. Just squeeze it in, beautiful and then we're going to fold this all together. So just go around the rim and get it all in there, fold it all in, keep the air in. It just looks and smells like sunshine. Beautiful, look at that. Okay we're going to put that now into a springform tin, 20 centimetres. I want to put a little greaseproof in the bottom just to be doubly sure that nothing sticks. Simply cut your greaseproof paper to match the size of the tin. Beautiful. So a little olive oil goes in, paper goes in and we just push it right into the bottom like that. Let's take that batter, let's go around the edge and let's pour it in. Amazing colour, those little threads of the blood orange zest, almost like little pieces of saffron. I'm going to pop it in the oven for 40 minutes and the temperature is 160 degrees Celsius which is 325 Fahrenheit. That's prepped and in the oven in under 10 minutes and whilst that bakes I've got an effortless glaze to make my cake even more glorious and gooey. We're going to make a little syrup. So what I'm going to do is equal quantities of honey, two or three tablespoons and orange juice and this is like a little drizzle that we're just going to put around the plate when it's finished. Let's bring that up to a nice little boil, turn it down to a simmer and when it's reduced by half to a syrup, beautiful, turn it off and then you've got cake, gorgeous blood orange and honey syrup because at the end of the day this is all about celebrating oranges. If it wasn't already orangey enough, I like to serve slices on the side too. Look at that, absolutely beautiful, it looks amazing. It's a beautiful, beautiful golden colour. Yes, look at that. You can let the cake cool but I can't resist tucking right in. It's beautiful the colour and that syrup, you know, it really, really just lifts it. The only thing to do now is, you know, proof is in the pudding. Five ingredients, a joy to make, something a bit different, so good. My orange almond and polenta cake, a glorious gluten-free dessert with none of the sacrifice, just a simple to make slice of sunshine.