Mandarin cake

Ingredients:

• 2 cups white sugar
• 125 grams butter, softened
• 1/4 cup cream fraiche
• 2 eggs
• 4 mandarins
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
• 2 cups plain flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

Method:

• Heat the oven to 180 degrees celsius. Grease and flour a 20-cm cake tin.
• Blitz the mandarins, skin on, until they are quite pulp-y with some shreds of skin (using a food processor or chopper attachment of a stick blender set).
• In a large bowl, cream the butter, sugar and cream fraiche together until light and fluffy.
• Add the eggs one at a time, blending after each addition.
• Stir the mandarin pulp and vanilla essence into the wet mixture (reserve a teaspoon of the pulp if you wish to use in icing).
• Sift together the flour, baking powder and baking soda. Add gradually to the wet mixture and stir in until just combined.
• Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin and bake for 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle is largely clean with a few crumbs.
• Cool on a cake rack in tin for ten minutes before turning out.
• Add the reserved teaspoon of pulp to a butter and icing sugar topping and ice when cool, or dust with icing sugar.

I’ve recently subscribed to Wonky Box – what a delight! It gives me a nice little pick-me-up throughout my week – make no mistake, I am exactly the kind of geek who finds vegetable-related updates exciting. Tuesday’s announcement of which goodies to expect in that week’s delivery, Thursday’s emailed invitation to track my Wonky delivery and finally, courier updates on Friday on my Wonky Box’s location, creeping tantalizingly closer to my front door and finally landing there on Friday afternoon. I’m loving the challenge of finding ways to use the different fruit and vegetables; the flavour is always excellent even if the shape is a little less-than-perfect.

A few recent boxes have included mandarins and I wanted to do something a little bolder than just skinning and eating ’em – which I must clarify, I do consider perfectly acceptable. They’re also quite lovely peeled, sliced vertically and added to salad (if you’re lucky I will post my favourite mandarin salad another time). But for some recent Wonky mandarins, I was hankering to go a little further.

I always put my hand up for bringing dessert to get-togethers because I love making sweet treats but I prefer a bigger audience for them than just my husband and me. Although we could happily polish off a whole cake between just the two of us, it’s probably better that we don’t do this on the regular. Family dinner a few weeks back called for a cake and I had a small pile of Wonky mandarins practically begging for attention from my fruit bowl.

I’ve blitzed oranges and lemons for cakes and other puddings in the past, but doing so with mandarins was new to me – I’m happy to report it worked well. Pulverising the mandarins with the skin on delivers delightful little bursts of sharpness in the cake, which is otherwise sweet and slightly crumbly. I topped this with a butter and icing sugar-based icing to keep it sweet for the smaller members of my family, however a dusting of icing sugar would also go nicely.