Span­ish Orange Almond Cake

My friends and I have fallen in love with a dessert from Spain, Orange Almond Cake. It’s a moist gluten-free cake burst­ing with orange fla­vors, and a crunchy almond tex­ture. I made it on request for a friend’s birth­day last month, and since then sev­eral of us have exper­i­mented with dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions on this theme. So far we’ve loved all the ver­sions that we have tried.

Variations on a Theme

My first ver­sion relied heav­ily on the Orange and Almond Cake recipe pub­lished by the James Beard Foun­da­tion. The final results were deli­cious, but the recipe’s rec­om­men­da­tion of a 400 degree oven for one hour or more was too hot, and too long for my Dacor oven. Mid­way through the bak­ing, my nose warned me that the oven was too hot, so I reduced the tem­per­a­ture first to 350 degrees and later on to 325.

The instruc­tion to but­ter and flour the pan for ease of removal did not work well enough. Using the but­tered pan method, my first cake required some dis­crete patch­ing before we served it… We cov­ered up the patch­work using thin slices of an orange dis­played in an attrac­tive pat­tern on top.

Variation #2

For my sec­ond bak­ing exper­i­ment I lined the pan with but­tered parch­ment paper. This allowed me to remove the cake from the pan with­out los­ing any pieces in the process. I also sub­sti­tuted lemon for some of the orange; instead of using two large oranges, I used  one-and-a-half oranges and one full lemon. It was good but we pre­ferred the all-orange recipe.

The sec­ond time I baked the cake, I sep­a­rated the eggs and whipped both yokes and egg whites quite a lot. This made for a higher, fluffier cake that was still plenty moist. My hus­band and I thought this han­dling of the eggs was much bet­ter than the orig­i­nal James Beard recipe.

For my sec­ond attempt I used a spring­form pan lined with parch­ment paper. No pieces were bro­ken when I removed the cake from the pan.

Variation #3

For our Super Bowl party my girl­friend made this cake, using my vari­a­tions. She was the birth­day girl for whom I made the cake last month. She loved it so much that she decided to make it for her next party…

Her cre­ative con­tri­bu­tion was a glaze made of mar­malade and Coin­treau that replaced the whipped cream. Scrump­tious!