Blueberry Almond Cake



I’m unintentionally stereotyping here but it is generally assumed that you could turn up at many a house in this country and expect to find the necessary elements for making a cup of tea within.  I’m talking the basics here, tea bags, milk and sugar of some description.  So when we had a gas man here the other day fixing our boiler we realised that we had none of the above.  He ended up being handed an instant black coffee from a jar so old my husband had to dig the granules out.  We were impressed he drank it all.  The reason we don’t have the basics to make visitor a nice cuppa?  Over the years for one reason or another we’ve cut out cow’s milk, we’ve both cut down on caffeine and I tend to buy healthy sugars for baking.  We can do herbal teas, we can do fresh black coffee.  We just lack tea, milk and sugar...  So if you come for tea give us some notice and if you time it right, there is sometimes cake.

A few weeks ago I made this almond cake shared by Kathryn of London Bakes via My Darling Lemon Thyme.  I love that the cake uses extra virgin olive oil and is made entirely from ground almonds.  Not having a mixer I feel I failed miserably at whipping the eggs until light and fluffy as instructed but the cake still turned out great.  My cake is quite a bit darker, perhaps because I used coconut palm sugar which was the only sugar I had (you see my point).  I threw in some frozen blueberries which I thawed a bit first. The result was a lovely moist cake, dense but with a nice crunch on top from the almonds.

Find the recipe here.