Gluten-free Christmas Cake Recipe

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What's great about it

This is my favourite recipe featured in my two cookbooks Healthy Baking + Purely Delicious. There is nothing more satisfying than baking your own cakes, puddings and biscuits for Christmas. Around this time of year I’m in my kitchen a little bit more than usual baking cakes and cookies and packaging them up as presents for friends and family. This is an extremely delicious and simple Christmas cake to make. It's a part of my great Aunty's recipe file along with other yummy healthy treats. This is a dense and moist fruit cake with a high ratio of fruit, which means I don't need to use any extra sugar in the recipe. I'm also using almond meal which replaces traditional white refined flours that make up most store bought cakes. The almond meal is also gluten free and adds moisture so I just need to add a small amount of macadamia nut or olive oil to make it complete. I love the combination of vanilla, orange and cinnamon in recipes and my Christmas cake is the perfect recipe to marry the flavours together.

Ingredients

600 g mixed dried fruit or a mix of the following (raisins, apricot, sultanas)

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon vanilla bean extract or paste

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

zest and juice from 1 orange

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

3 organic eggs

200 g (2 cups) ground almonds

50 g walnuts

Method

Preheat your oven to 160°C fan forced.
Prepare a 20 cm round cake tin with baking paper lining the sides and the base.
Combine dried fruit, spice, vanilla, orange zest + juice, olive oil and eggs.
Add the almonds and walnuts and mix through.
Spoon Christmas Cake batter into your baking tin.
Bake for 1 hour and 30 minutes. Check with a skewer to see if it comes out clean, if not bake for another 30 minutes.
Cover the top if necessary to prevent over-browning.
Cool, then remove from the tin and store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 1 month.

Notes and Inspiration

If you wish to soak your Christmas cake in orange liqueur, as soon as you remove the cake from the oven, skewer holes through the cake and drizzle over ¼ cup orange liqueur so it can penetrate through the holes and infuse into the cake.

This cake can also be served as a pudding served with vanilla bean custard or thick natural yoghurt and orange blossom honey.