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Updated May 2025

Tom-Kerridge-Gluten-Free-Spiced-Orange-Cake

In the frenzy leading up to Christmas, my friend and I were inspired to make some of the dishes from Tom Kerridge’s Christmas programme. One of those dishes was this gluten free spiced orange cake made with almond flour. Watching him do it on the tele made it look really easy.

There is another version of this cake that Nigella made famous. It is made with tangerines instead of oranges. So use whatever citrus fruit you can get hold of. Why not mix and match for a completely different flavour. It is just such a delicious cake and gluten free too.

This flourless cake is made with almond flour so it is perfect for those who are gluten intolerant. The addition of the boiled orages and other ingredients makes this a very moist cake and quite impossible to get wrong.

A festive citrussy gluten free cake

We gathered all the ingredients and late on Christmas Eve we decided to start making this. Here is where I say, you have to read the recipe and instructions before you attempt any recipe. Little did we know that this recipe would take quite a while to make as we had to firstly boil some oranges for an hour and a half. Not deterred, we soldiered on til the wee hours of the morning.

The process, when simplified looks very easy, boil oranges, mash them up, mix in all the ingredients, bake, glaze, serve.

In reality, there are no baking tricks needed, just quite a bit of time. By the time the cake finished baking, we decided to go to bed instead of making the other elements of the recipe, the ice cream and the spiced plum sauce. (We made a smile marmalade glaze instead as we ran out of time).

You need to start off with boiling the citrus fruit, we used oranges but Nigella uses tangerines. Cover with cold water, bring to the boil and simmer for 1½-2 hours, or until the skins are soft and the insides broken down.

Drain the boiled fruit and, when cool enough to handle, cut each orange in half and remove the seeds. Then, chop everything finely — skins, pith, fruit — in the food processor or by hand.

Preheat the oven to 160C/325F/Gas 3 and grease and line a 24cm/9½in loaf tin or a 20cm/8in cake tin.

You will need to weigh the orange pulp and keep 450g/1lb (discard the rest). Place this back in food processor with all the dry ingredients and add the eggs one at a time until you have a smooth batter. I just mixed all the ingredients in a mixing bowl by hand instead and works just fine.

Pour the cake mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 1 hour -1 hour 20 minutes, or until the sides start to come away from the tin. Check the cake after 40 minutes and cover with aluminium foil to stop the top burning.

As the cake batter is quite wet, it took a lot longer to bake than expected. And every oven varies in heat, regardless of what the dials say. So check the cake with a skewer when It is close to 1hr 20 mins. If it is still wet in the middle and the skewer doesn’t come out clean, let it bake for another 10 minutes and check again.

Remove the cake from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack.

The next day, we added a simple marmalade glaze to the cake and served it with some vanilla ice cream. It went down a treat.

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Gluten Free Spiced Orange and Almond cake

This recipe makes one large gluten free cake

Ingredients

For the cake

3 oranges
300 g/10½oz ground almonds
300 g/10½oz caster sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
7 free-range eggs
some marmalade for glazing
orange liquer optional

Instructions

For the cake, put the unpeeled oranges in a pan with a lid.
Cover with cold water, bring to the boil and simmer for 1½-2 hours, or until the skins are soft and the insides broken down.
Drain and, when cool enough to handle, cut each orange in half and remove the seeds.
Chop everything finely — skins, pith, fruit — in the food processor.
Preheat the oven to 160C/325F/Gas 3 and grease and line a 24cm/9½in loaf tin or a 20cm/8in cake tin.
Weigh the orange pulp and keep 450g/1lb (discard the rest).
Place back in food processor with all the dry ingredients and add the eggs one at a time until you have a smooth batter. I just mixed all the ingredients in a mixing bowl instead.
Pour the cake mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 1 hour -1 hour 20 minutes, or until the sides start to come away from the tin.
Check the cake after 40 minutes and cover with aluminium foil to stop the top burning.
Remove the cake from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack.
When the cake is cold, remove it from the tin.
Heat some fine peel orange marmalade in a pan and spread it over the cake. If you want it boozy, you can always poke some holes in the cake with a skewer and pour over some orange liqueur.

Notes

Warning, this cakes take about 3 1/2 hours to make so leave plenty of time. This is a lovely gluten free almond flour cake recipe with the unique addition of boiled oranges for flavour instead of orange essence. Very easy to make and will keep for a few days after you make it.

Equipment used for this cake: