Ooooh, this is a good one, for me this is the perfect Sunday teatime cake. Let's just get it out there - I love pistachios.I love how they taste, I love how they photograph, and I love the wholesome, green, bejewelled tone they impart to everything you add them to. Probably my favourite things about this cake (apart from its deliciousness) is the surprise pop of colour when you slice it.
And it's incredibly simple to make. The only piece of "special" equipment you will need is a food processor to blitz the pistachios into a coarse sandy meal. I always like to keep my ground nuts on the coarser side, but the great thing here is that you can choose exactly how you want them.
And apart from that it is your standard cake mixture, with the only twist being the separated eggs, meaning you can whip up the egg whites and fold them in at the end to increase the fluffiness of the finished cake.
Ingredients for the
cake
- 225g butter
- 105g caster sugar
- 55g brown sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla sugar
- 3 eggs, separated
- Zest of 1 lemon
- 150g pistachios, ground (reserving 30g for a topping)
- 100g ground almonds
- 65g plain flour
- ¼ tsp salt
- ½ tsp ground cardamom
For the icing
- 100g icing sugar
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tbsp water
Method
Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius.
Begin by creaming the butter and the sugars. Then beat in
the egg yolks one at a time.
Add in the ground pistachios and almonds and mix well. Then
stir through the lemon zest.
Mix together the flour, salt and cardamom, and fold into the
eggy mixture.
Whisk the egg whites until light and fluffy, and then fold
this into the floury, eggy mixture.
Tip into a greased and lined cake tin, and bake in the oven
for 40 minutes. Then cover with tinfoil and bake for another 25 minutes, until
a knife comes out clean.
Allow to cool in the tin.
When cool, make the icing by combining all the ingredients
and drizzling on top of the cake. Then scatter over the pistachios and allow to
set for at least 30 minutes before serving. Enjoy!
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