Bulletproof Cake

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…or What Happens When You Buy Food Because It's Cute

Okay, so we've been eating Cuties lately. Cuties are clementines (or sometimes Mandarin oranges) that are small, easy to peel, seedless and sweet. I had seen them in the grocery store but had never tried them. After reading Pioneer Woman's blog singing their praises (and their addictive quality), I bought a bag. Rich and I devoured them just as fast her family did. So I started buying them regularly—sometimes Cuties, sometimes Sweeties, sometimes Clemmys, whatever variation I came across.

As I mentioned, they're small. Well, the last time I was shopping for them, my local grocery had some of the tiniest ones I had ever seen. Really, the larger ones were the size of golf balls. Tiny. And, gosh, they were just so darn cute! So instead of buying normal-sized Cuties (wow, that's a phrase), I bought the tiny little miniature ones. Because they were cute.

But, cute or not, they were kind of a pain to eat. They weren't harder to peel or anything, it just took the same amount of effort and there wasn't as much return. We started to not bother with it. And, so, three weeks later, we still had a big bowl of clementines, only they were starting to look a little tired. As I always do in these circumstances,* I went looking for something to do with them, i.e., a recipe that would use them up, and found this. It's been decades since I attempted a flour-free cake, but it looked interesting, not too complicated and it would use a whole pound of aging clementines. Perfect!

Well. Maybe. First I forgot to cute the cooked clementines in half, and they do contain the occasional seed. Shrug that off; extra fiber, right? Secondly—and this one isn't my fault—how much exactly is a "heaping teaspoon?" Baking is chemistry. It's precise. Even if you never, ever measure anything in the kitchen, you have to measure when you bake, and pretty carefully, too, unless you're not all that concerned about the results. So how much, exactly, is a heaping teaspoon?

This?                                            That?

But none of that was as much of a problem as my unfamiliarity with my own food processor, the big one. To be perfectly honest, I hardly ever use it. I've got this fabulous Oskar that sits out on the counter, chops onions and makes bread crumbs like nobody's business, and takes maybe fifteen seconds to rinse clean. I love it, and use it for all except the really big jobs, such as chopping twelve tiny, boiled clementines. I hauled out the big processor and set it up. I dumped in the clementines (still whole, since I forgot about removing the seeds), put the lid on and hit the switch. For some reason, the bottom layer just sat there, untouched, while the top half was perfectly chopped. Hit pulse again. The top was chopped even finer, but the whole clementines on the bottom were still intact. After a few more tries, I finally looked really closely and discovered that my food processor has a smaller bowl stored inside the full-size bowl. I don't know if it's intended to be used that way for some application, but the smaller bowl kept the blade from fitting against the bottom of either bowl. So the fruit on top was gradually turned to liquid while the stuff on the bottom sat undisturbed.

Doesn't look suspicious.

Surprise!

Plus, each of those pulses had spattered and splattered the now-liquified top layer all over the inside of the bowl. It coated the lid, the plunger, every nook, every cranny—and some of the space between the inner and outer bowls. That fact came into play once I realized what I had done, and stopped to take the freakin' bowls apart. Just so you know, that's impossible to do when everything is coated with slippery, orange goo.

Eventually I got it done. I mixed the clementines, more pureed than "finely chopped," with everything else, put it in the oven and baked it. It cooled overnight, and considering the whole comedy of errors—which I started shortly before midnight, BTW—it appears to have turned out okay.

It looks more or less like Nigella's, right?

I haven't cut it yet because Rich has been out all day and it was such a big deal to make, I need a little fanfare. But I did learn a few things through all this.

• I should use my big food processor more often, or at least look at it more carefully.
• Boiling clementines smell delicious and, oddly, just like cake.
• Almond meal is dang expensive.
• Little tiny clementines, cut in half and squeezed, contain exactly the perfect quantity of juice to add just the right touch to a Blue Moon beer.

I wish I had realized that last one a little sooner.

*I'm cheap. I don't like wasting food, or the money it took to buy it.