Ingredients
- 2 large blood or navel oranges
- 1 ¼ cups Xylitol low GI, low calorie natural sweetener (castor sugar can be substituted if preferred)
- 1 tspn gluten-free baking powder
- 5 free-range eggs
- 1 ½ cups ground hazelnuts or almonds
- Pure icing sugar to serve
Preparation
Grease the base of a cake tin and preheat oven to 170C. Place two whole oranges in a saucepan and cover with water, bring to the boil, simmer with the lid on for 1 hour then drain and cool - ensure oranges remain covered with water. Chop oranges into quarters, discarding seeds, and place the quarters (skin on) into a blender and puree until smooth. Beat eggs with Xylitol or sugar until thick. Add the orange puree, ground almonds and baking powder and mix well. Pour into greased tin and bake for one hour. Leave the cake in the tin for twenty minutes to firm, and then turn out onto a wire cooling rack. To serve, sift icing sugar over the top and decorate with orange and zest and roasted broken and bashed hazelnuts.
Notes/Tips/References
ABOUT XYLITOL
Xylitol is a 100% natural sweetener that is as sweet as sugar but has 40% less calories. Derived from plants such as corn cobs and birch trees, and brightly-colored fruits like strawberries, raspberries and plums, this all-natural nutritive sweetener, without the aftertaste of artificial sweeteners like aspartame, provides your body with a safe source of energy that doesn’t have side effects. In its crystalline form, it can replace sugar in cooking, baking, as a sweetener for beverages or sprinkled over cereals. Xylitol metabolises inside the body without using insulin making it the perfect choice for people looking to safely reintroduce sweets into their diets. Because Xylitol and sugar react similarly to heat, Xylitol can substitute for sugar in cooking and baking on essentially a one-to-one ratio.