Lemon Clementine Cake with Chocolate Icing

This recipe comes from Ottolenghi’s and Tamimi’s book Jerusalem, and I tried it for the first time during my No Cost Food Week. Now it has become one of my favourite cakes: it’s chocolaty and fruity at the same time, and it keeps very well at least four or five days in the fridge.

The problem is to find organic clementines from which it’s safe to use the zest. If you can’t find any, you can use orange as well, but the result is (at least in my opinion) a little bit less delicious. Oh, and I obviously reduced the amount of sugar compared to the original recipe. I’m not a fan of overly sweet stuff – in case you are, feel free to use more sugar!

For one cake you need:

• 200g butter


• 200g sugar


• grated zest of 4 clementines and 1 lemon


• 250g ground almonds


• 5 organic eggs


• 120 g whole-grain (spelt) flour


• pinch of salt

For the syrup:

• 80g sugar


• juice of 4 clementines and one lemon

For the chocolate icing:

• 90g butter


• 150g dark chocolate


• 1 Tbsp honey


• 1 Tbsp cognac

Set your oven to 180 C. Mix together butter (cut in small cubes) and sugar until fluffy. Add the grated clementine and lemon zest. Then add the eggs, one by one, and keep mixing. Combine together flour, salt, ground almonds, and add into the butter-sugar-egg-mixture. Oil a round cake form (mine has a diameter of 24cm) and pour the batter in it. Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick comes out clean, or about 25-30 minutes.

In the meantime, prepare the syrup: combine sugar and juices in a pan and bring to a boil. When the cake comes out of the oven, sprinkle the syrup evenly on it. Let cool down in the form about 15 minutes, then remove and place on a serving plate.

Now it’s time to make the icing: place butter, chocolate, honey, and cognac in a pan and heat slowly until all ingredients melt. Stir carefully with a wooden spoon. You can also do the icing in the microwave oven or in bain-marie – less risk of burning it!

Spread the icing evenly on your cake. Decorate with long strips of (organic!) orange zest. Mine looked more like carrot peels, but it looked kind of cool anyway!

If you have time, cool the cake well before eating it – our unanimous opinion was that it tasted clearly better when cold!