Tarta de Santiago - St James Cake

This tart is from the North West of Spain (Galicia), it is made in honor of their patron St James whose remains are buried in Santiago de Compostela and has a really important pilgrim route.
I ate this cake lots of times but never cook it before and  as I could not find any recipe in my Spanish cooking books I made a research on line and found one that I really like, I was quite surprised to know that this cake has no flour, milk or butter, so if you use vegetable margarine to grease the tin people with dairy intolerance can eat it.

You will need:

250g of ground almonds
250g of white sugar
4 eggs
1  grated lemon grind
1tsp of ground cinnamon
Dusting sugar for decoration
23cm tin

The recipe I found says just to put the rind of half lemon, I put the whole grated lemon rind just because I do really like lemon, you can choose.

We pre-heat the oven at 200C and grease the tin.

Put the ground almond, the  grated lemon grind and the cinnamon together in a bowl and stir until combine.

In another bowl put the sugar and the eggs and cream them using a manual whisker, do not use an electric whisker because we do not want to add too much air to the mix.

Once we have the eggs creamed we start adding the almond mix slowly and combine it with a silicon spatula until it is homogeneous.

Now we pour the mix into the tin and put it in the oven, just after we do this, we change the oven temperature to 180C and bake it for about 30 minutes, check that it is cook properly before you take it out.

We put it to cool down on a rack and wait a few minutes before we remove the cake from the tin. Once it is cold we decorate with dusting sugar, the St James cake has a cross on top of the cake, I looked for it on line, printed it, cut it and used it to decorate my cake, if you do not want to do it, just sprinkle the dusting sugar on top of the cake.

And now just enjoy :)

 Photos by Jorge Deepsea

3 CHOCOLATES LAYERED CAKE

This is a really easy to do cake, the only tricky part is allowing the chocolate to cool down before pouring.

You will need:

175g of white chocolate
175g of milk chocolate
175g of dark chocolate
1L of double cream
0.5L of milk
21g of gelatine powder
125g of white sugar
200g of biscuits
80g of butter
23cm cake tin

First of all we make the cake base with the biscuits and the butter, we grind the biscuits and mix them with the melted butter and press the mix on the base of the tin, like you do for a cheesecake, we allow it to cool down a bit.

Meanwhile the base is cooling down, we put the cream and the milk together and stirr. We take 0.5L and we put it in a pan, add the white chocolate and the gelatine powder, heat it up until it boils, don't forget to stirr so it doesn't stick to the pan. We wait a few minutes and we pour it on the cake base. Now we wait until it is set and cold, so cold that we can draw lines with a fork on the surface, this way the next layer would not slip.

Once it is cold we do the same for the milk chocolate but we add 50g of white sugar, and then 75g for the dark chocolate.

Once is cold remove from the tin and enjoy :)

The original recipe is made with powder rennet (Cuajada Royal) that is uses for aa really popular dessert in Spain (Cuajada), but it is really difficult to find in the UK so I just swap it for gelatine and turned out beautifully.

Photos by Jorge Deepsea :)