This lovely cake is a nice moist vegan cake, made with plenty of zest and juice from a bunch of mandarins. It went down well with our neighbours! You can use oranges instead, or any orangey fruit, I'm sure.
Serves 12, takes about 90 minutes.
Ingredients:
Start your oven pre-heating to 180 C.
In a pestle and mortar, grind the clove, and then add the chia seeds and grind them too. No need to grind them all fine, just as long as plenty of them have cracked. Add 4 tsp water and leave it to stand - the chia should turn it sticky.
Line a one-litre loaf tin with baking paper, and grease it.
Now prepare your mandarins. First of all, use a zester (or a sharp knife, or possibly a grater) to grate the zest off in fine pieces, and then put the zest into a small bowl. Then chop the mandarins in half (across their "equator") and squeeze the juices into a separate jug (mine gave me about 200ml juice). Make sure there are no seeds in the juice.
In a mixing bowl, mix together the sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and two-thirds of the zest.
The other one-third of the zest will be used for the drizzle on top. We're also going to use one-third of the juice for that, so at this point you take one-third of the juice and add it to the zest that you held back.
By now, the chia will have had a few minutes to turn into a sticky wet blob. Now add this to the jug that still contains most of the mandarin juice. Also add the veg oil and the oat milk to that. Mix all these wet ingredients together, making sure that the chia breaks up and distributes well throughout.
Pour all these wet ingredients into the bowl which contains the sugar and spices, and mix them well. Then sift in the flour, baking powder and bicarb. Mix them well together, and immediately pour this into the buttered loaf pan.
Bake in a buttered loaf pan for 50 min at 180 C, until a knife stuck into the cake comes out clean.
Meanwhile, mix the icing sugar into the reserved zest+juice (remember, this was one-third of what you had). This glazing will be drizzled over the finished cake.
WHen it's ready, take the loaf out of the oven (still in its tin), and use a fork to prick some holes all over it. Chia-based cakes have a slightly "crispy" exterior so you may need to poke enthusiastically. Then drizzle the glaze over the whole loaf, making sure that the bits of zest are spread evenly over.
Allow the cake to cool in the tin for 10 or 20 minutes, then life it out gently, then out of the paper too and onto a wire rack to cool.