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I don’t usually like fruit in cakes. I’ve just come around to fruit in pies being a good thing. But I named my daughter Clementine, and with her first birthday coming up, I figured I owed it to ourselves to try out a clementine cake. 

I was pulled in by this Nigella Lawson recipe because it was so bizarro. You boil clementines for two hours and then grind them up whole - skins, pith, and all. (Nigella says to take out the pips, which we know as seeds, but which from here on out I will call pips. I know my clementines had pips before I boiled them, but after, nary a one. Hello, where are me pips? I said out loud to no one, because I really just wanted to start talking about pips.)

Back to the bizarro cake - you boil and grind clementines, grind up a bunch of almonds, beat a bunch of eggs, add some sugar and baking soda and that’s it. Five ingredients, strange but quick prep work, and voila! A cake!

I’ll link to Nigella’s picture because I had already sliced mine up and shared it before I thought to take a picture, but trust me, my cake was just as pretty:

I topped it with fresh whipped cream, which makes anything delicious. It does taste like any orange cake at first, but then you realize you’re chewing longer than normal because of the almonds. (It’s here when you start to realize why I’m not a food writer, isn’t it?) I suppose I could grind the almonds longer - and probably will next time - but right now I’m kind of enjoying it. I also read a tip to grind the almonds with the sugar to absorb the oil. 

So there it is. Bizarro Clementine Cake. Make it today.

Oooops - almost forgot. This is the recipe I used so that I didn’t have to make the metric conversions on my own. 
http://smittenkitchen.com/2009/01/clementine-cake/
She suggests a much shorter baking time, but mine was in line with the 45 minutes Nigella suggested.