Fuck Off Bunting.

This a really lovely cake I made and you should also make it for several reasons,

-it is very delicious
-it can’t be long til Great British Bake Off is back so you can make it as your entry for the office ‘charity bake off’
-it will expand your baking repertoire beyond a soggy carrot cake

I spotted this gorgeous recipe over at Domestic Sluttery a few weeks ago and have been waiting for any feeble excuse to bake it ever since- here’s the full recipe. USE IT.
The combination of pomegranate and tahini gave it a grown up cosmopolitan edge, you can never quite get from an old Victoria sponge.

I have had an obsession with butter-less cakes for a while now, not because I am health conscious or lactose intolerant or an activist for cow’s rights, but because I had a slice of Orange, Rosemary and Olive Oil cake a while back that was so delicious it haunts my dreams.

Please if anyone has a mind blowing recipe for a such a cake send it my way so I can stop the endless loop of cake chasing visions.
…But it is an additional brucey bonus that this cake is both dairy and gluten free, should you have buddies of that persuasion.

I am such a fan girl of the Domestic Sluttery gang and they have LOADSA grown up cake recipes, perfect for the occasions where you need to show off in the ‘oh this old thing‘ type nonchalantly smug way- Gin & tonic cake anyone?! whip up some black forest gateaux cookies why don’t you?!

The occasion I decided needed a dead fancy cake for, as a matter of  urgency and necessity was, a Wednesday…in the office.

The recipe replaces butter with tahini, which is a little peculiar, if you are used to the traditional baking method, but stick with it per the recipe and you end up with an amazing nutty richness. You will have to go to a posh supermarket to make this one friends, this is not a tesco express kinda affair.
You can see I couldn’t wait to try this cake, so I made a little mini one to tide me over and test it wasn’t poisonous before I offered it up to my colleagues.

I stuck to recipe apart from a few very minor tweaks-
I used a combination of polenta from the pack (the slightly grainy yellowish stuff) but also a little cornmeal flour (finer ground polenta) the type you get in the world section, I like the one from ‘East End’. I did this only because some polenta based cakes I have made in the past, have been a touch on the claggy side- so I switched about 50g of the polenta for the cornmeal flour instead, just to lighten a little.

As warned in the recipe, you will make a great bloody mess deseeding pomegranate. I go for a more time consuming by hand method, picking the seeds out one by one, like a little monkey, a little monkey with pomegranate juice splattered down their topshop breton. Another favourite suggested method is to bash the back of the fruit with a wooden spoon to dislodge the seeds, any other suggestions? Please send answers and oil olive cake recipes on the back of a post card to ‘Breton wearing Capuchin next to the cakes, London’.
Once the deseeding is done you can get onto the delicious syrup. I added a little more sugar to the syrup than in the recipe, because the fruit I had wasn’t a particularly sweet one, you win some you loose some monkey face.

In the future I will double the pomegranate syrup to a bigger batch, so I can keep some in the liquor cabinet. It is so delicious I could imagine it in many a quaffable cocktails.
Cake followed by a tequila sunrise with delicious home-made grenadine anyone?