Cake for Breakfast?! Why on earth not! My Almond Breakfast Cake is dairy-free and sweet enough to give you an early morning hit without blasting away all of your tooth enamel. Make it the night before so you can take a slice with your morning coffee.
I’m not a fan of specialist equipment in the kitchen that won’t lend itself to multiple recipes. I’ve bought too many gadgets and gizmos for them to retire to the back of cupboards, preventing the truly useful, often relied upon items from being stored securely.
Take that round aluminium Christmas Pudding mould that I bought one year after getting lost in back-to-back reruns of Fanny Craddock Cooks for Christmas. If you’ve never seen this seasonal treat from the BBC archives, I insist you track down a copy immediately. Not for the recipes – I would not inflict a mincemeat omelette on anyone – but for the sheer entertainment of Ms Craddock.
In one episode, Fanny makes it her mission to bring back the Dickensian round Christmas Puddings by strapping two metal sieves together to form a sort of squat-shaped ball. Of course this led me onto an Amazon hunt for a truly spherical mould which now languishes inside the cupboard above the fridge – being too large and unwieldly to live anywhere else.
This solitary recipe required me to buy a savarin mould tin – once more sourced late at night on Amazon for an investment of £8.59. I won’t lie and say it gets a huge amount of use in my kitchen, but it is worth it for this recipe alone.
I can only compare the taste of this cake to French toast. While the texture is not at all gelatinous, the taste is almost custardy of eggs, vanilla, almond extract and citrus zest. It’s also dairy-free – albeit not vegan as it uses eggs. Perfect for as a sweet treat at breakfast time or as a mid-morning elevenses, washed down with a cup of strong black coffee.
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Almond Breakfast Cake
- Total Time: 45 minutes
- Yield: 12 1x
Ingredients
- 3 free range eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1tsp almond extract
- 250g golden caster sugar
- 200ml almond milk
- 100ml sunflower oil
- 150g plain flour
- 75g cornflour
- 1 medium orange – zest only
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4.
- Lightly grease the savarin mould with a little of the sunflower oil and dust with a teaspoon of flour. This will help the cake to keeps its shape when you come to remove it later on.
- Separate the eggs into two clean bowls. Using an electric beater, whisk up the egg whites until they reach the stiff peak stage (a soft mountain will form in the mix when you remove the beaters and hold its shape).
- In the second bowl, whisk together the egg yolks with the sugar and vanilla extract until it is light and fluffy. Continue whisking while you pour to sunflower oil in a steady stream before adding the almond milk.
- Sift together the two flours before beating into the egg yolk mix.
- Fold in the stiffened egg whites to the golden yolk batter. To do this, beat in a couple of spoonfuls of the egg whites to help slacken the yellow batter before folding the rest of the egg whites through with a metal spoon. Be careful to keep as much air in the mix as possible without leaving any flecks of egg white.
- Finally, fold through the orange zest before gently pouring the batter into the prepared savarin tin.
- Bake in the oven for around 30 minutes until the cake is golden and a skewer comes out clean from the thickest part of the ring.
- Allow the cake to rest in the tin for 15 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Once cool, dust thickly with icing sugar and serve.
- Prep Time: 15 minutes
- Cook Time: 30 minutes
- Category: Breakfast, Baking, Cake
Keywords: Baking, Breakfast, Breakfast Cake, Cake, Dairy-Free
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