Flourless nut cake

Kaja owes me 4 recipes, 3 recipes. This is the first: a recipe for flourless nut cake, which I couldn’t make anyway because I’m allergic to walnuts. But apparently it’s delicious. So I recommend it 🙂

“One of those simple cakes. There’s no story behind it, apart from the fact that I don’t eat flour. Hence the idea of a cake made from ground nuts. What’s more, you can eat lots of it because it doesn’t contain… SUGAR either!!! It has xylitol instead. No, that’s not an antidepressant, and no, it’s not a weight-loss product. Xylitol is ‘a naturally derived sugar obtained from birch (yes, the tree)’ — it has a low glycaemic index (more than 14 times lower than sugar) and almost half the calories of regular sugar. You’ll probably ask what that has to do with primitive cooking. Well, it does! It means the cake isn’t fattening and you can devour the whole thing at once, without a guilty conscience — like a true primitive. And you certainly can devour it, because it really is delicious.

What’s more, the primitive panel (and the non-primitive one too! — parents, that means you) rated the cake veeeery highly.

So, with a clear conscience, I present this recipe for a diet-friendly, healthy nut cake without flour or sugar!!!”

Recipe details:

Preparation time: 15 minutes

Baking time: 45 minutes

Baking temperature: 180 degrees Celsius

Serves: the smallest piece for Jacek

Calories: fewer than if it had real sugar in it 🙂

Ingredients for a little nutty treat:

• 200 g ground hazelnuts (at Carrefour — that wasn’t an advert, a note from PrymitywnaKuchnia.pl — you can buy a little packet of ground hazelnuts for around 10 zł; otherwise you’ll need to grind the nuts yourself)
• 5 eggs (definitely free-range, so the hens don’t suffer)
• 150 g xylitol (an expensive business, available in delicatessens, health food shops and “better” supermarkets)
• a teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 100 g butter
• finely grated zest of one lemon (scalded and washed)
• half a glass of honey (whichever kind you like; I happened to have acacia honey at home)
• a glass of shelled walnuts

Recipe for walnut cake without flour or sugar:

I melted the butter in a saucepan and set it aside to cool. I separated the egg whites and yolks into two bowls. I whisked the whites with an electric mixer until stiff and set them aside (doing it this way means you can then beat the yolks without washing the beaters — ah, sweet laziness).

I added the xylitol to the bowl of yolks and beat them with the mixer (using those same, unwashed beaters) until fluffy, then added the vanilla extract, ground nuts and cooled butter and mixed everything together.

Next, I added the beaten whites to the nut-and-egg mixture with a spoon, in five batches, folding gently. I poured the finished mixture into a springform tin lined with baking paper and baked it for 45 minutes in an oven preheated to 180 degrees Celsius.

With 10 minutes of baking time left, I put the roughly chopped walnuts into the saucepan (the one I’d melted the butter in and hadn’t washed afterwards 🙂 ) and toasted them until golden. Then I poured the honey over the nuts and grated the lemon zest into the pan. I cooked everything over a low heat until the cake was done. I took the cake out of the oven and spread the honey-coated nuts evenly over the top while it was still warm, so that some of the honey would soak into the cake. Done. Enjoy.

Oh! I recommend eating the cake once it’s cooled 🙂 and not sneaking honey-coated nuts out of the saucepan, because you could burn yourself 🙂