Chocolate Clementine Cake

In addition to the mince pies, I made a flourless chocolate clementine cake. It is a simple, moist cake, with a dense crumb but a with a surprising lightness. As it happens, I've been wanting to try making this cake for years, ever since I noticed it in the chocolate cake section of Nigella Feasts (she makes it with oranges, but clementines seem more Christmas-y.) The problem with the cake is you have to purée whole cooked oranges. Nigella gives instructions on how to do this by hand, but it seems like a lot of work for a not as good result (it could be an equally good result, but I'm not confident that I'd have the patience to the patience to chop it as finely as necessary.) Well, now I happen to have a food processor at my disposal, so I had to try this! As I said, it is a delicious cake, but then again I've always been partial to the combination of chocolate and orange.

Look at the inside of that cake--pure chocolaty goodness!

Since I was making this for Christmas dinner, I couldn't just leave it plain as Nigella suggests. So I got some marzipan and went crazy with luster dust. On a related note, I have noticed that in England most marzipan and fondant covered cakes are made with the covering stuck directly to the cake. I did what they taught me at the FCI and spread a layer of buttercream on the cake before covering it with marzipan. That makes for a smooth surface with a thinner layer of marzipan (or fondant) and adds a layer of buttercream which is always a good thing in my book.

A close up of the decorations

I used the natural creamy color of the marzipan as the base and decorated the cake with marzipan snowflake cut outs and silver dragées. I dusted each marzipan cut out with silver luster dust before sticking them on the cake, so they popped nicely but didn't contrast too starkly with the almond-colored base. So pretty!