Baking
Whole Mandarin Cake
A cake made by blending three whole mandarins, peel and all, with the eggs, olive oil and sugar, then folding in self-raising flour. Five ingredients, one blender, and a moist, zesty sponge finished with a dusting of icing sugar.
Makes 8" round cake (8 slices) · Prep 10 mins · Cook 45 mins · 6 ingredients · 5 steps
Ingredients
- 3 seedless mandarins (whole, unpeeled)
- 2 eggs
- 125ml olive oil (½ cup)
- 220g caster sugar (1 cup)
- 300g self-raising flour (2 cups)
- Icing sugar (to dust, optional)
Method
- Heat the oven. Preheat your oven to 180C/160C Fan and line an 8" round cake tin with baking paper.
- Blend the batter. Put the mandarins, eggs, olive oil and caster sugar into the blender and blend until completely smooth, with no flecks of peel left.
- Fold in the flour. Pour the mandarin mixture into a large bowl, add the self-raising flour and fold it in until just combined.
- Bake the cake. Scrape the batter into the prepared tin and bake for 45 minutes, until golden and fragrant and a skewer pushed into the centre comes out clean.
- Cool and serve. Leave the cake in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn it out onto a wire rack to cool. Dust with icing sugar before serving.
Good to know
- Every bit of the peel is eaten, so wash the mandarins well. Seedless ones save picking out pips; with any other kind, halve them and take the pips out first, or they turn the cake bitter.
- Blend for longer rather than less — a stubborn fleck of peel is a bitter mouthful.
- Fold the flour in by hand and stop as soon as no dry flour shows. Beating it makes the cake tough.
- Ovens and tins vary, so trust the skewer over the clock, and cover the top loosely with foil if it browns before the middle is done.
- Serve it topped with a few fresh mandarin segments on the icing sugar.
- See also the Whole Orange Blender Cake, which does the same with a whole orange but uses oats and maple syrup in place of flour and sugar.