Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Olive Oil Cake

Love her or loathe her, Nigella Lawson's cookery books and TV shows always provide me with at least a couple of dishes that I end up making time and time again. In her latest book, Nigellissima, my new fail-safe recipe is a flour and butter-free chocolate cake. The flour is replaced with ground almonds and the butter with olive oil and I originally made this to try out for my friend Steph who has recently discovered she is gluten intollerant. I've since made it three times as it's bloody good.

The edges end up a little crusty and crumbly and the centre is really delicious, rich and moist - more like a pudding than a cut and keep cake, yet it lasts for up to a week and remains just as moist for that long.

150ml regular olive oil

50g good quality cocoa (I use Green & Black's)

125ml boiling water

2 tsp vanilla extract

150g ground almonds

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Pinch of sal

200g caster sugar

3 eggs

Pre-heat the oven to 170 degrees and grease and line a 23cm spring form tin.

Sift the cocoa into a small bowl and whisk in the boiling water till you have a smooth, chocolatey paste that's still slightly runny. Whisk in the vanilla extract and set aside to cool a little.

In a different bowl combine the ground almonds with the bicarb and salt.

(Nigella advises using a an electric mixer for this next step but I don't have such a luxury and so stick to the old fashioned method). Beat together the eggs, sugar and olive oil vigourously for about five minutes until you are left with a pale, aerated and thickened mixture.

Continue beating and slowly add the chocolate paste until it's all mixed in then finally fold in the almond mixture until all combined.

Pour into the tin and bake for 40-45 minutes. A knife or skewer should come out mostly clean, with the odd sticky crumb.

Allow to cool a little before turning out of the tin and then sift over a tiny bit of icing sugar if you fancy.

As I said this is a really lovely, rich yet moist cake, but as with all baked things, can be greatly improved with a big dollop of cream. Enjoy!