Gluten free orange cake recipe

Today I am happy to share with you a recipe to make a delicious gluten free, lactose free orange cake by a dear friend and a talented French cook, Fanny Biasini.

Fanny is also a trained pastry chef and when we talked about sharing a recipe for Baci di Dama, it couldn’t but be one of her favourites: this cake with orange, lemons, and bergamot is so moist and yummy that we fully enjoyed it during an afternoon tea on a Sunday.

And yes, we both love those beautiful, sometimes decadent, English tea time…wish we could have one together in London one day soon 😉

INSTRUCTIONS

Preheat the over at 180°C

1 Peel the zest of the lemon, orange and bergamot and put them aside in a small bowl

2 Squeeze their juice and put it in a glass

3 Beat the coconut oil until it becomes soft and smooth. In French we say ‘pommade’ to suggest a creamy like consistency

4 Add the sugar and keep beating

5 Add the eggs and mix with the help of a spatula

6 Sift and mix the flour, the starch, the almond, the yeast in a separate bowl.

7 Add them to the mixture with the eggs, the sugar and the coconut oil.

8 Add the zest

9 Grease a cake tin or simply put some baking paper on it.

10 Pour in the mixture – it has to get to 2/3 of the cake tin height. Put it in the oven at 180°C for about 35 minutes, then at 160°C for 25mn.

11 While baking the cake, let’s make the syrup: remember to put aside 2cc of the juice; we will use it for the icing.

Add about 3 tablespoons of icing sugar in the juice and mix. Actually it really depends on your taste and how sweet you like it to be. So it’s better to taste to see how you like it. Mix until everything is perfectly blended.

12 After an hour, take the cake out of the over and let it cool down.

13 With the help of a toothpick, make little holes on the cake surface and the brush it with the syrup. Do this when the cake is still hot. It will absorb the syrup more easily and it will get all juicy and moist.

14 To make the icing, mix the 2cc of juice with some icing sugar – remember that the more icing sugar you add, the more it will become white. So again, it depends on your taste. Pour the icing on the cake and decorate as it most pleases you. Here we chose some candied orange and freshly peeled zest.

Enjoy!