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Hazelnut fruit cake recipe – Ottolenghi inspired

2nd May 2020 by Eve Bidmead Leave a Comment

The words “Ottolenghi” and “simple” normally don’t go together. Yotam Ottolenghi is well aware of his fame for complicated recipes and hard to source ingredients (as he put it himself in his Guardian column: “I’ve heard the jokes…the one about “just popping out to the local shop to buy the papers, milk, black garlic and sumac”).

He is also a man who moves with the times and recognises peoples’ eternal struggle to find time to cook. This was the inspiration behind his newest cookbook Simple.

If you like Ottolenghi flavours but are put off by the faff, this is the book for you. It includes recipes with 10-or less ingredients, others you can make-ahead of serving, as well as quick meals you can have on the table in under 30 minutes. Within Simple lies one of my favourite cake recipes of all time – a hazelnut sponge with peaches and raspberries.

I’ve tweaked the recipe to give you more options for alternative ingredients because the whole world and his dog are baking at the minute and you’re lucky if you can snag up a bag of flour these days; you can flex this recipe based on what you have to hand.

I also reduced the sugar from 320 to 260 grams – not because I want to make this in any way a “healthy bake” (I think life is way too short for that nonsense). I love the tartness the fruit can provide and don’t want to dim the gloriously nutty richness of the hazelnuts by making the batter overly sweet. It worked really well and I recommend you go for this amount of sugar too.

A note on the fruit: the original recipe calls for 2 large peaches sliced into 1.5 cm wedges + 150 grams raspberries. You could sub apples, plums, apricots, pears…just think, the harder the fruit, the smaller your slices will need to be. For the berries you can use blueberries, strawberries or blackberries, and these can even be frozen. We’re flexing here, but the concept is the same: hazelnut + fruit = winning combo.

Hazelnut + fruits of your choice cake – an Ottolenghi adaptation

Ingredients

  • 450 grams of fruit (I used rhuburb and plum and it was cracking)
  • 260 grams sugar (original recipe calls for white caster, I used golden – either works)
  • 125g hazelnuts (skin off – try to buy them like this as otherwise it’s a bit of a faff, but see here on how to remove the skins if needed)
  • 200 grams unsalted butter (room temperature)
  • 3 large eggs
  • 125 grams plain flour ( if you only have self-raising, half the amount of baking powder)
  • 1.5 tsp baking powder
  • Tiny pinch of salt

Method

  1. Turn oven to 170 degrees and line a 24cm round cake tin
  2. Mix your fruits with 1 tbsp of sugar and set aside
  3. Grind hazelnuts in a food processor and once roughly ground (under a minute) mix with flour, baking powder and salt in seperate bowl
  4. Beat sugar into the butter – easiest if you use a form of electric whisk
  5. Gradually add eggs to butter mix and then add in your flour hazelnut mix
  6. Pour batter into lined cake tin and place your fruit on top
  7. Bake for 70-80 minutes but cover cake with tin foil after half an hour to avoid it overly browning on top

Ottolenghi says this will keep for a day but I found it perfectly edible after three. In fact, I think the hazelnut flavour got richer over time, so if you do for whatever reason have some left after a day or two, don’t despair.

And then you’re done – enjoy with a cup of tea and Netflix

Filed Under: cake, dessert, easy recipe, ottolenghi, recipe Tagged With: baking, cake, hazelnut cake, ottolenghi, recipe, simple recipe

Quinoa, Sweet Potato and Spinach Baked Eggs with Berry Frozen Yogurt

29th July 2014 by Eve Bidmead Leave a Comment

You can’t beat a good egg. Poached, fried, scrambled, in an omelette or a frittata, there’re so many things you can do with eggs. They are also filled with goodness. Eggs contain a whopping 18 different vitamins and minerals, are a source of omega-3 fats (the healthy fats) and provide us with the highest nutritional quality protein of all food sources….so it’s fair to say these little-shelled beauties pack quite the nutritional punch. But should you be looking for something slightly more exciting than just scrambled on toast, this egg-bake could be just the dish for you.

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Cooked in a tomato-pepper sauce with quinoa, spinach and mashed sweet potato, these baked eggs are a great lunch or dinner dish to share. Served with a mixed leaf salad with tomato, avocado and pomegranate and some quick homemade frozen yogurt, this dish was the main of choice for an alfresco summer lunch at mine with some of my very lovely friends. 

For this dish, you will need:

(Serves 4 hungry girls + 1 father… 5-6 people)

Egg Bake
– 200g quinoa (mine is red and white blend – I really like the colour and texture, but normal quinoa would work just fine)
– 3 sweet potatoes, peeled (add in 1 tbsp grainy mustard, a squidge of tomato ketchup and a generous grind of black pepper for mashing)
-Half a big bag of spinach
– 2 peppers (any color you chose, I went for red and yellow)
– 1 onion
-1 Can of chopped tomatoes
– 1 tbsp of tomato pesto
– 1 tsp of harissa paste
– 1 tsp oregano
– 9 eggs

Salad
– Big bag of mixed leaves
– A couple handful of cherry tomatoes
– 1 large avocado
– Any seeds/nuts you fancy to scatter over
– Seeds of half a pomegranate
– Maple syrup (or honey) and olive oil for drizzling
– Good grinding of salt and pepper

 Homemade frozen yogurt

– 150g frozen raspberries
– 250g yogurt of your choice
– 2 tbsp of honey

Frozen Yogurt recipe

Start with the frozen yogurt so it can chill in the freezer while you do the eggs. This really is the very simplest of desserts, and always goes down well. The ingredients are variable, and you can use any frozen fruit or flavor yogurt you fancy. I went for raspberries and used a mix of vanilla and greek yogurt.

Place the frozen fruit and yogurt into a blender, and blend until minimal fruit chunks remain and the yogurt and fruit are completely combined. Pop it into a tupperware….

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And into the freezer it goes. It’s good to serve when it’s still a bit soft, as if you leave it to really freeze up it gets a bit crystallised. It’s just an incentive to eat it all up in one go really!

Now lets get cracking on the eggs (pun intended).

Egg bake recipe

1) Cook your quinoa for 15 minutes in a pan with boiling water.
2) While your quinoa is cooking, you can peel and chop your sweet potato into cubes, ready for steaming or boiling. You want to steam or boil them for the same time the quinoa is cooking, and while they’re both cooking away we can get on with the tomato sauce.

Note on the tomato sauce – This is a simple tomato sauce with a few key add-ins. The harissa gives it a slightly spicy twang and the sun-dried tomato pesto adds an almost smokey flavor. Oregano is the key to tie it all together, making some form of Italian-style sauce. As with my energy bars, this recipe is a bit of an improvisation, so work with what you want to make a tasty tomato sauce! Our sauce is going to have onions, garlic, and peppers – I used one red pepper and one yellow. 

3) Finely chop and cook the onion for 5 minutes and then add the sliced peppers. Here you want to add in your harissa, pesto and oregano, followed by the chopped tomatoes. If you have a hand blender feel free to whizz this up – I used my food processor, but it could equally be left chunky. With the sauce done, it’s time to attend to our quinoa and sweet potato.
5) Take the quinoa off the heat and drain. Separately mash the potato, mixing it with the tomato sauce and add in 1 tbsp grainy mustard, a squidge of tomato ketchup and a generous grind of black pepper. Combine the drained quinoa and mashed potato/tomato mix together, adding in the spinach in bits until it is all wilted.
6) Spread the quinoa/sweet potato/tomato/spinach mash in a baking tray, and make little circular indentations for eggs to nestle in. Crack in eggs, and don’t worry if the whites spill over their allocated mini-holes.

IMG_28057) That goes into the oven at 200 degrees celsius for about 10-15 minutes, and now we can make the salad.

There’s no real art form involved in this, it really is just a combination of all the ingredients in a bowl, and for the dressing I chose a very simple olive oil drizzle with a touch of maple syrup – I use this slight sugary touch to really bring out the sweetness of the tomatoes. 

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Serve all together, bringing out the frozen yogurt just before serving. 

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 The muffins served alongside the yogurt were baked by my wonderful friend Lily, and are from an Ottolenghi recipe. They were truly sumptuous – nutty and rich but not overly sweet, they went down a treat. I found the recipe reposted on the website What Rachel Ate, which is also a fantastic blog.

All this delicious food, and the company of some gorgeous girls and sunshine. A perfect afternoon!

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Filed Under: healthy, review Tagged With: egg bake, eggs, frozen yogurt, ottolenghi, protein, quinoa, spinach, sweet potato

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