January 17, 2024
A friend offered to bring cake to our weekly small group meeting, but held off when she heard I was planning to bake a cake. “My dessert can wait til next week. I can’t say no to a Jeannie Rose cake!”
I replied, “It’s mostly an excuse to use up some clementines that had gotten too hard to peel. Cake is like the casserole of past its prime fruit.”
A bowl of clementines sits on our counter, comprised of the initial bag we bought to placate our children on the long flight home from the grandparents’ in early January, and the follow up clementines that came in a farm share a week later. The remnants are golf ball sized, still moderately squishy, but with leathered peel, and our kids, who usually eat four at a sitting, aren’t bothering anymore. I can’t be bothered either, not when there’s a new shipment of juicy pink Cara Caras waiting to take their place.
I come from a long line of dedicated food waste avoiders. My grandmother washed and reused paper towels and ziplocks, and once had a grave beef with me in the mistaken belief I’d tossed half a very expired box of Bisquick. Not I, dear grandma, not I!
This situation would thus be untenable but for a little trick up my sleeve. At times like this, there’s one place I go–like black bananas into banana bread, so are old mini citrus transformed into a moist almond polenta cake by former British Baking quarter-finalist Benjamina Ebuehi.
Her *ingenious technique is similar to the first part of making marmalade: you simmer citrus for a spell, rinse and change the water, simmer again, rinse again. After a while, nearly an hour, the peels are thoroughly tender and free of bitterness. Then you blitz it all into a chunky puree, and that aromatic neon delight becomes the central moisture in the gluten-free cake. As a certified gluten lover, I almost never bake gluten free, but this one works out that way as a happy accident. It’s really just a supremely satisfying way to use otherwise compost-bound clementines. Anything to avoid food waste!
*A week or two later, a friend starts telling me about a cake she made based on a Lebanese cake technique very similar to this, and further research shows a similar Claudia Roden recipe from a 1984 cookbook. Some of the internet says the technique originates from Sephardic Jews in Sicily, or in the Iberian peninsula; the other half points to the Middle East. If Sephardic Jewish and Lebanese grandmothers are anything like mine, any of them might of transformed nearly expired oranges into cake just to avoid tossing them. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my fact-checker husband, is that no one person invented pretty much anything related to food. In any event, I appreciate the clue to potential Lebanese roots, and Benjamini’s cookbook for making it accessible to me.
The puree could be frozen and used any time the urge for a sunny perfumed dessert strikes. But at my friend’s urging I plowed ahead with the cake. I removed it from the toaster oven, as both the convention and speed ovens were in use, just as our small group arrived for a post-holidays catch up dinner. We feasted on a for-no-reason Irish stew and soda bread, then stayed up past our bedtimes deeply engrossed in cozy herbal tea and cake-fueled conversation. An ordinary and delightful Wednesday night. Maybe I should buy more clementines…
Recipe: Clementine Cake, The New Way to Cake (well worth buying!)
Modifications
Intentional: None.
Unintentional: None.
Results: Superb as always. She cautions in the recipe that it darkens easily and you can cover with foil to avoid it. I neglected to do this and in the close range of the toaster oven, indeed it pushed toward the dark side. But upon closer inspection, and in contrast to the bright orange speckled interior, it’s more burnished than burned, and perfectly tasty.
