Kate FM: Spanish chocolate cake!

It was my brother's birthday a few days before mine. We weren't sure what kind of cake to bake him, til I came across a recipe for 'Spanish chocolate cake' in the latest Sainsbury's magazine. Perfect.
A good thing about this cake is that - for a chocolate cake - it uses fairly healthy ingredients: ground almonds, olive oil and orange juice instead of butter. Maybe it's these ingredients that make it 'Spanish'? When I tasted the cake mixture pre-bake all I could taste was olive oil which was a tad concerning (it tasted like those Spanish tortas de aceite which I don't really like). Relievedly the long baking time of the cake allows this taste to dissipate and be replaced by a delicious chocolate orange flavour.
Another good thing is that it's the easiest recipe in the world to make and results in a very moist loaf - I'm no fan of stick-in-your-throat dry chocolate cake - rich and moreish, and like a chocolate cake should be.

Spanish chocolate cake (taken from Sainsbury's magazine June 2012)

Ingredients

125g plain flour
50g cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
100g ground almonds
175g caster sugar (I used 125g)
3 large eggs, beaten
200ml olive oil, plus extra for greasing
finely grated zest of 1 large orange
1 tsp vanilla extract
100ml freshly squeezed orange juice

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees, fan 160, gas 4. Grease a 1kg loaf tin with olive oil/butter and line with baking paper.
2. Sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt into a mixing bowl.
3. Stir in the ground almonds and caster sugar.
4. Make a well in the centre and add the beaten eggs, olive oil, orange zest and juice and mix to a smooth batter.
5. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 1 hour 10 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. (Cover the cake with baking paper after 50 mins.)
6. Remove cake from tin and leave to cool.

It's meant to be eaten as is, served with strawberries or raspberries, but as this was a birthday cake we decided to ice it. The cake comes out very uneven on top (cracked and crater like) so we sliced bits off to make it flat (the excess had to be sampled, obviously) and used simple chocolate water icing and smarties to decorate.